Tick Tock, Enigma
by Satiah
Summary: It had started as simple curiosity. It evolved into a secret. But that secret was tainted by madness, and the madness became an Enigma. AU. -Complete-
1. Chapter 1

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

... ... ...

_It had started out as simple curiosity._

_That was all. Just curiosity._

_(But, then again, that's how these things always begin, isn't it?)_

_..._

Eliot slumped down in his chair as he heard the dismissal bells chime out their final, much anticipated tolls. Almost immediately, the newly reanimated bodies of zombified math students swarmed around his desk, some forming swirling pockets of eddies as they grouped together to talk with their friends, most streaming towards the door in an ever ebbing tide of chattering bodies, books, and bags. A sea of white uniforms and glowing cellphones streamed past Eliot with the urgency of a turning tide, but Eliot didn't see it. He didn't see anything when he was thinking.

Only when the room was mostly empty, save for a handful of students playing the latest fantasy card game in the back corner, did Eliot stir from his self-induced trance. He blinked his unfocused, slate blue eyes slowly, unhurriedly stretching out in his chair before sighing once and picking up his neglected sword and book bag from the floor. Finally back from what his brothers dubbed "La-La-Land," Eliot simply shrugged his shoulders until his book bag settled itself comfortably upon his back. He turned fluidly on his heel and set off towards the door.

It was sunny outside: the grass a thick, richly green carpet blanketing the campus in softly rolling hills; beds of flowers abloom with the vibrant variety of an artist's palette; fountains twinkling as the bright sunlight glittered off their playfully splashing spirits. Eliot drew in a deep breath of fresh, sun-warmed summer air before setting off towards home, thinking of how gorgeous the day was, and wondering why the hell he had to suffer the best part of it inside a series of stuffy classrooms in the company of a bunch of sweaty, uniformed kids.

It was otherwise a pleasant walk home, with just enough of a breeze to caress Eliot's sweat-shined face to satisfying coolness. He smiled as he crossed the front door's threshold and looked upon the shoes scattering the entryway of the Nightray mansion. Judging by the lack of abundant, cluttering footwear, he had made it home before his four older siblings. But, judging by the mess, not before his younger two. Eliot reached down and straightened Gilbert's haphazardly arranged shoes, rearranging them so the right shoe sat on the right, and the left on the left. He then plopped a smaller shoe next to Gilbert's, but couldn't find its match. After searching for a bit, he reached across the entryway to retrieve Vincent's missing sneaker from behind the plant stand, and thusly reunited it with its brother.

After placing his own shoes neatly on the other side of Gilbert's, Eliot rummaged through the fridge until he found something tasty to snack upon. His eyes carefully perused over the selection, noting the fresh fruit salad; the slices of ripe, red watermelon; the vegetable tray; the meat tray; the cheese tray; the instant reduced-calorie pudding. Grabbing a leftover slice of chocolate cake, Eliot stuck a fork in his mouth, collected his bags, and proceeded up the stairs to his room.

He removed his sword from its carrying case and placed it carefully in a nook between his computer desk and bookshelf, threw his book bag on the floor in some forgotten corner, and sat himself in a swiveling computer chair while he devoured a generous forkful of cake. Placing the plate and fork on the computer desk, he turned on his computer and thoughtfully chewed upon another bite while he waited for the machine to boot up. That done, Eliot threw a glance over his shoulder to make sure his door was securely closed and locked before paying attention to the softly glowing screen. Typing quickly, he logged into an informal chat forum dedicated to discussing his favorite book series, _Holy Knight_, and angrily responded to the newest bundle of clutter-heads who dared disagree with his opinion of that worthless, self-sacrificing shit-bag, Edgar.

Glancing quickly at the digital clock in the corner of his screen, Eliot decided it was time. He logged off of the chat site and navigated to another, similar site; this one dedicated to fan-based reviews and critical insights of literature, of which the _Holy Knight_ series was included. Eliot glanced once more at the clock. He'd have to be fast. If he didn't make the first move, he wouldn't get another opportunity.

Methodically flexing his fingers above the keyboard, Eliot took a breath to calm himself while he contemplated what he would type. However, as he carefully watched the scrolling chat box update itself, his pondering ceased. The question had finally appeared.

_/Page 454, Volume XII: What is the name of the woman selling apples in the marketplace?_

Typing as quickly as he could, Eliot immediately responded:

_She had no name, but her boyfriend called her "Cherry."_

A moment passed. Eliot blinked the sweat out of his eyes and ran his sleeve across his forehead to collect the rest before it, too, decided to blind him. It was so hot outside, and he had yet to change out of his stuffy school uniform. Grumbling slightly, he contemplated opening the window, but flicked his eyes instead to the response waiting on the computer screen.

_/Correct_.

_/389224_

Smiling triumphantly, Eliot got up and opened the window.

...

It had been his secret for several months now. Each day passed much like the one before: he woke up, attended school, walked himself home, rearranged his siblings' shoes (or coats or bags or whatever other mess they had left for him to trip over), grabbed a snack, and shut himself in his room, waiting. He would wait patiently (or impatiently, depending how well the rest of his day had transpired) for the question to appear. It was never late or early, always at 4:23, exactly. He didn't know why; it seemed such a strange time to choose, but he did know the event never lasted long. He had to be ready, he had to be fast, he had to be first. Only the first correct answer got the code.

There were days where he failed to answer the question correctly. There were days he missed the posting altogether. Sometimes he had the right answer, changed his mind, and submitted an incorrect response. Sometimes he submitted nonsense, accidentally garbling his message because his fingers had been too twitchy to type. More than once, he had been second. He had been third. He had been 739th for all that it mattered; anything less than first was inconsequential. Anything less was losing. And Eliot Nightray did not lose.

The questions were often obscure, but they always included a page and volume reference. However, only the weak frantically tore through the shelves of their beloved collection, searching vainly for the answer on the promised page; only the weak wasted their time in such a fashion. Only the weak copied the question into their online search boxes and scoured the Internet for answers, hoping to discover the hidden jewels before someone with a faster connection could.

He wasn't weak. He was a _master_.

Only the masters knew the material inside and out. Only the masters had the dedication to remember the tiniest of details, but he knew it came from more than simple, rote memorization. The questions, although difficult, had a certain pattern to them. If you knew the pattern, you could guess the next day's question: simple enough if you payed attention. This was Eliot's preferred method of attack, and more often than not, he succeeded. But, he wasn't the only master online, watching, waiting. There were others just as quick as he, just as familiar with the _Holy Knight_ series.

If he lost, he would be found in a terrible temper for the remainder of the evening; his life soured by some stupid idiot with some equally stupid screen name. Eliot would sulk, hands shoved deeply into his pockets, slouching so far down in his seat that his brothers would tease him about sitting on an invisible extension of his chair. He would glare at them and angrily retort, voice quickly rising to a snappish, fiery shout if annoyed long enough, and his loving siblings made sure he usually was. After tiring of their provocations, something he did rather quickly, he would once more retire to his room, glaring venomously at this or that along the way, and pass the remainder of the day secluded from the rest of the household, choosing instead of his siblings' normally amiable companionship the chance to sulk bitterly in his silent room alone.

If he won, however, and received the code (something he was admittedly coming to expect, now that his major competitor, _ZZHolyKnight551_, had moved into a new apartment with somewhat of an iffy Internet connection) his spirits would remain undaunted for the rest of the evening. Nothing made Eliot quite as happy as winning (Nightrays were naturally victorious creatures). It also didn't hurt to smirk triumphantly at the scrolling responses as he watched "ZZ" enter his own correct response just a bit too late.

Today was a day of victory, obviously, and Eliot took his time dressing into something cooler and more comfortable than his starchy uniform. The breeze blowing through his open window pleasantly circulated the stale, hot air out and brought in the light fragrance of his mother's favorite lilac bush, which, coincidentally, had been planted very near to his bedroom. He sat upon the edge of his bed and drew in a deep, slow breath, savoring the smell as he remembered his mother taking him by the hand to walk him through her lilac garden when he was small. He remembered having to take four steps to her one, but she patiently stayed by his side, walking slowly, holding him up with her gentle hands when he tripped on the loose rocks of the backyard garden path.

She wasn't dead, but she was gone. He wasn't sure where; his father had never bothered to enlighten him as to her destination, but she had been traveling, or touristing, or _whatever_ for the past three years. Eliot missed her. He missed her smile, her gentleness, the warmth she had brought to their patchwork family of siblings, half-siblings, and adopted orphans. But he would never admit it. It was weakness (and hence non-conducive to being a Nightray) to appear so dependent upon another person, especially one's _mom_. He was in high school, for goodness' sake!

Sighing, Eliot opened his eyes and closed the window, shutting out the smell that reminded him so much of her. Choosing instead to switch on the overhead fan, he returned to his computer chair, flicked out his notepad with today's code hastily scrawled atop the first sheet, and punched at his keyboard until he found himself staring at another login screen. With a last look at the cryptic numbers, he turned his back on the window and entered the code, lilacs bobbing gently in the breeze outside, unnoticed.

...

It wasn't that Eliot was lonely. It was hard to be considered lonely when you lived in a house as lively as his. If he didn't have Fred, Claude, or Ernest hovering over him like the nosey older siblings they were, the elbows of his black jackets were being tugged on by either little Gilbert or Vincent to come out and play (most often, they came to him as a set). His sister, Vanessa, didn't bother him much, unless somebody had recently been in her stuff (then it was always _his_ fault, no matter that the culprit was usually Claude because he liked to pick on his little sister like that); since this happened on a regular basis, he saw her at least twice a day.

So his secret wasn't kept because he was lonely. Neither was it something "scandalous" or otherwise damaging to his, or the Nightray family's, reputation. He simply liked to keep his business to himself. Therefore, he was careful to lock the door whenever he was about to answer the daily _Holy Knight _question (to minimize interruptions at such a crucial time) or whenever he was redeeming his code. Since Eliot was terribly possessive of his business, he greatly preferred to be left alone whenever he was in his room; therefore, it may be more accurate to say his door was only left unlocked when he wasn't to be found inside. (This hermit-like tendency for complete privacy at his computer lead to the sharing of many jokes among his four amused elder siblings, but Eliot ignored them because he knew they were wrong about their suppositions.)

_Three-eight-nine-two-two-four_. He pondered over the sequence while he waited for the page to load. Sometimes this took a while. Tired of watching the page do nothing, he began doodling the numbers on his notepad, lying them in any sequence he could think of. Frustrated, he crumpled the cluttered paper and began again on a new sheet, this time carefully overlapping the numbers until they formed a horizontal chain. Then a vertical chain. A backwards chain. Then an aggravated, scribbly mess. Hissing a sigh through clenched teeth, he threw his pencil on the desk and ran his hands through his hair. There was supposed to be a clue, but he wasn't seeing it.

The page failed to load. Eliot slammed the refresh button, pushed his chair away from his desk, and glared at the piece of paper gloating on the desk before him. It knew the secret, but it wasn't telling, and that pissed him off.

Reaching once more for his pencil, Eliot had the idea that, perhaps, today's clue wasn't to be found in the importance of the sequence of numbers, but rather amid the text itself. He pulled his well-read Volume XII off of its place on his bookshelf, flipped open to page 454, and found the woman called Cherry. There it was. The number he had been looking for: twenty-two. She had sold twenty-two apples, and her boyfriend had defeated nine enemies on his way to meet her. Grinning eagerly now, Eliot nixed the last three numbers from his sequence and stared at what remained. _Three-eight-nine... three-eight-nine..._ he thought, mulling the numbers over in his mind as the chatroom's page once again refused to load. Pressing refresh for what he threatened to be the last time, he realized suddenly what the significance of his newest mantra was. _That's the number of Knights in the original King's Order! Gregory would have made 390, had he stayed to complete his training!_

Holding a smug smile on his face, Eliot made a note of "Gregory" and the other named Knights on his notepad in preparation for the next day's trivia. It was plausible to assume the question would have to do with the King's Order (Volume XIV), and he wanted to be sure he remembered it in the morning.

...

Eliot didn't know how the other users found their way into this specific group; the secure entry code he used was changed daily. He had never seen a trivia quiz on other sites, but they obviously must have existed _somewhere_, for each member here was an elitist in _Holy Knight_ knowledge. This was a group of readers who had transcended the mere addiction to a good fantasy story and pushed the lines of near-obsession; they each critically read, memorized, analyzed, and discovered the truths hidden within the series. For example, every member would have known "Cherry" was actually a minor character who, without fail, appeared in every one of the _Holy Knight's_ author's works (including the seven short stories written before the idea of _Holy Knight_ even came into being) but was never formally given a name. No ordinary reader would be privy to that sort of information, and they would be even less likely to know she was actually based on the author's first girlfriend's favorite childhood toy: a talking doll that spewed catchphrases pertaining to healthy eating when its string was pulled.

He knew they were all just a bunch of nerds who had nothing better to do with their time than obsess over a fictional series, but he didn't particularly care. He loved the books (he'd read the entire series several times, no less than four, but he didn't bother to count anymore) and the other users loved it, too. But, as with every social gathering, regardless of form, this group of bookworms had to have a bookworm that was somehow book-wormier than the others: a king to direct their little nerdy fan-reader group. That's how Eliot saw it, anyway.

And that was part of his secret.

...

_It had started out as simple curiosity._

He had stumbled across the entrance site, managed to answer the question before anybody else (it had been a lucky guess, really), and was given his first code. Having nothing better to do, he shrugged to himself and lazily typed it in, watching with disinterest as he was redirected to another chat forum. Seeing it was still devoted to discussing his favorite books, Eliot poked around like the bored teenager he was until he began to notice a pattern; there was a particular user who, when he (_or she_, Eliot remembered; how he hated the anonymity of the Web) posted a message, all other activity on the site momentarily paused. The posts of this user weren't verbose or lengthy, but they were so insightfully _different_ that the whole community ground to a halt to ponder the message before jumping off it with their own opinions like a high school dive team from a springboard.

Well, maybe not the _whole_ site, but it seemed like that at the time.

Thus, Eliot was introduced to the King of Nerds, as he came to call him (or _her_, but Eliot just went ahead and assumed it was a male. Girls didn't read "those stupid books," as Vanessa had told him once). Eliot, like many before him, had been intrigued by the strangely divergent outlook provided by this mysterious reader; his insights were most certainly contrary to mainstream ideas. This often resulted in the aforementioned opinions being quickly shot down by diehard fans, but somehow, this particular member was still held in high esteem among the community. Wondering why, Eliot tried to meet this individual, but to no avail. So, taking option number two, he came back every day to see if he could win another code.

_That was the curiosity, and that was how it had begun._

Since then, Eliot had managed to establish himself as a worthy member, and was welcomed into the secret community. He didn't particularly care about acceptance by the other members, but his apparent worthiness leant him credibility, and that seemed to be a good place for him to start. As he became a more familiar, regular visitor, he started to pick up on the Nerd King's schedule. It was much like his, but Eliot obviously had more time to kill; the Nerd King only stayed online an hour at a time, while Eliot had the rest of the evening to waste.

There were rumors that the King of Nerds was the author of the series. Eliot didn't buy them. There were rumors that the guy was a college professor, someone who studied these books as part of his career, thus explaining the amount of unique insights contrary to the accepted views of the fandom. Eliot might had believed that one, but that was before he started chatting with him.

...

_This was his secret. _

Eliot didn't obsess over the site for the chance to read new theories; that was for geeks. He didn't drool over the posts made by so-and-so because "so-and-so" had fantastic ideas; he could actually care less. He didn't pay attention to the newest theories about the peculiar characterization of Stacy the Merchanting Milkmaid from volumes four, six, and twelve; he knew all he wanted to know about her, and was too squeamish to dig any further.

He hadn't become dependent on some anonymous member of some stupid Internet community who named himself after an equally stupid fifth-grade spelling word. He hadn't become obsessed over some person on the other side of the world he couldn't see. He hadn't wasted every afternoon of his life for the past two months hunting down this user because he craved the companionship of some faceless voice that happened to have some really interesting ideas.

What he had done was make a friend. An intelligent friend. Someone who spoke plainly and truthfully, even if his opinions absolutely stank and were rejected by everyone else, including Eliot. Someone who was simple; simple to the point that his screen name was only six letters long: _Enigma_. Now, the name in itself was far from simple, but Eliot didn't want to hurt his head thinking about something that would probably turn out to just be a word the kid had liked from his elementary school English classes, so he didn't think about it; he didn't really care.

What mattered was that he had made a friend. Although it had started out as simple curiosity, he had come to rely on this other person, welcoming the sincerity and bluntness he couldn't find among his siblings. This was someone he could talk to, be honest with, and since he was still anonymous, Eliot couldn't be teased for being weak for the things he said. While Eliot hated to admit it, Enigma reminded him of his mother; never sugarcoating anything, but somehow remaining gentle, nonetheless.

Except for when they disagreed.

...

They fought about everything: the books (how dare Enigma like that filth, Edgar!); weather preference (Eliot liked the sun, Enigma liked to drown himself in the rain); choice of dessert (chocolate versus butterscotch, ew); and whatever else they could think of. They fought more than they got along, escalating a friendly conversation into full-fledged assaults in nothing short of seven minutes, with Enigma just as likely to get nasty about his opinions as Eliot. The strange thing was, if Eliot became angry first, Enigma would promptly diffuse, making Eliot look like an immature, hotheaded idiot for blowing up so quickly over something so trivial. However, if Enigma's short fuse was touched off first, they both exploded like a hot wick to dynamite sticks. It made no sense to Eliot, but, after looking at his friend's pseudonym, he figured he was better off not trying to figure it out.

Months had passed this way, and Eliot, while not addicted to the interaction, had become to rely on the honesty of discourse provided by Enigma. It gave him an escape from the mask he had to wear as the model student, as the perfect Nightray son in front of his father, as the dependable elder brother, as the mockable younger brother, as the ideal son of a noble. All of which were faces _of_ him, but none of which _defined_ him. But, to Engima, none of those roles mattered: Eliot could be Eliot. He could be truthful, he could be angry, he could be bitter or resentful or vulnerable, and none of it would matter because they were friends and they were equals.

...

_/You've never asked for my e-mail address, moron._

Eliot blinked in surprise before narrowing his eyes at the message. _That cheeky bastard! What the hell?_ Pushing his chair away from his desk, Eliot decided not to respond until he figured out what Enigma was up to. Glaring at the message, Eliot stormed down the stairs to forage in the kitchen for something sweet. Finding a fruit parfait, he sat himself upon the kitchen counter and dug his spoon into the yogurt's granola-encrusted layers. Seething at the thought of Enigma's pretentious tone, but also embarrassed that he hadn't actually _thought_ of asking (and thus avoiding the whole get-the-code trial), Eliot chewed on his dessert until he decided he didn't have an intelligent reply.

Sighing in defeat, he slammed his empty glass into the dishwasher and headed back to his room. The door was left slightly ajar, and he could see the obnoxious glow of his computer screen illuminating the crossed Nightray swords that hung decoratively upon his wall. Looking at them, he stared at the interplay between the flickering light (probably another ad for some online fantasy game) and the dancing shadows cast by the swords upon his wall. They flickered slightly, like tongues of darkened fire, reminding him of the long-ago swirl of his mother's favorite dancing skirts.

Returning to reality, Eliot turned his back on the swords and his mother's memory, sitting himself down in his chair with a tired _whump_. He turned back to the screen and read Enigma's latest message:

_/You've never asked where I live._

_Why would I do that? It's not like I care. _Eliot typed back, still simmering because this kid really knew how to get under his skin.

_/I know where __**you**__ live._

The reply was unexpected, to say the least. Baffled, Eliot glanced out his window and watched the lilacs slowly sway back and forth, back and forth, dancing smoothly, hypnotically. They traced lavender circles in front of his window as their accompanying green leaves flittered along, seeming like hands clapping, keeping time, cheering, waving, applauding, or beckoning. He wasn't sure why, but he suddenly felt chills run up and down his spine, as if he were being watched. Knowing that was impossible (his door was locked, after all) he tried his best to nonchalantly shrug off the feeling and come up with a proper response for this stupid kid's stupid joke. He responded, but he couldn't shake the feeling.

_No you don't, kid._

_/Yes, I do, Eliot._

He narrowed his eyes again, searching the screen. There was nothing to give away his identity; he had never used his real name online, and he certainly wasn't careless. He hadn't mentioned his school or his home address, the names or ages of his brothers or sister, nor anything else he could think of that would lend any trace to his identity outside of his own alias. Eliot could only think of one way out: he'd have to force Enigma to explain how he knew.

_That's not my name. _

_/So you say._

_It isn't._

_/Okay, okay. It isn't._

Enigma didn't take the bait. Eliot didn't know what to do now. He slid down in his chair, still feeling as if his skin had been dunked in ice and decided to shrivel up on itself in a paltry excuse for retaining warmth. Deciding he'd rather turn on the overhead light than sit in a darkened, computer-lit room with so many thick, pooling shadows creeping around the corners (shut up, he wasn't scared. He was already in high school, for crying out loud!), he got up and turned to face the doorway where the switch was located. Stumbling over the chair because he hadn't quite pushed it back far enough to let himself out, he momentarily glimpsed something dark outside his window, standing between the lilacs. Feeling incredibly edgy, he recovered his balance and looked out, expecting to see Fred or Claude or Ernest or _somebody_ standing outside, making faces and pulling a prank on him. Maybe it would even be the gardeners pruning the damn bushes in the middle of the night!

As his eyes settled firmly on the lilac bush, Eliot clearly saw the dark shape hadn't moved; it definitely wasn't part of his imagination. But it wasn't Claude or one of the gardeners. It was somebody else, with madness-bright, wild, shining eyes; those eyes were staring straight at him.

...

Eliot couldn't speak. He could only stare: stare in disbelief at those corybantic eyes. They were large, expanded with lunacy, and they were searching, probing, _searing_ until Eliot felt their owner pierce through the protective barriers of his mind; roaming around inside of him, long-fingered hands sifting though his memories, body passing beyond his closed emotional doors, effortlessly rifling through him, all of him, the most secret parts of him. Boring into his head, tearing through his soul, breaking him down until he was nothing more than a pathetic, weak thing struggling to regain control, but unable to fight back, unable to stand. He was shivering and naked, exposed to the other with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, and nothing of his was his any longer.

The sensation passed, and he found himself staring out the window at an innocently unoccupied lilac bush, purple flowers swaying ever so gently in the breeze, dancing back and forth in soothing, hypnotic circles: back and forth, back and forth.

Back and forth.

Tick and tock.

...


	2. Chapter 2

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

... ... ...

His dreams that night were nightmares. That wasn't unusual for him; he often dreamed of massacre and blood. But this was different; this was a dream of eldritch phantoms, of ghostly horrors he couldn't see. He knew they circled him, invisible in their impenetrable cloaks of twisted, roiling shadows, scrutinizing him with an intensity that made his blood run cold with fire while his skin heated by ice. His knees weakened and he fell away from the phantoms, landing in the arms of a frozen, skeletal embrace. He thrashed, panicked, tried to escape, ran, fell, and fell again. He kept falling until he thought he could fall no more, but then he fell into his mother's encircling arms. Looking at her, he begged for help, tears glistening unshed in slate-blue, child-frightened eyes. But his mother had not the face of his mother, so he ran and ran and tangled himself in a bush of dancing lilac nonsense, helplessly fighting for escape as he watched the face of a boy appear in his window: insane, beautiful eyes glittering with unspoken madness.

He awoke thrashing his sheets aside, gasping for breath as he sweated beads of terror. In his dream-induced fright, he sat up suddenly and found himself facing the reality of his nightmare: that soft, boyish face inspecting him with those round, round eyes. Panicked, he attempted to scream, but as soon as his mouth opened it was smothered, buried swiftly and forcefully beneath a decorative pillow, and he couldn't breathe, couldn't scream, couldn't cry out for help, couldn't see.

_He couldn't see. _

_He couldn't see the nightmare._

He calmed down, letting the intense surge of panic ebb. He was a Nightray: a fighter. He let his body move instinctually, years of trained muscle memory flowing through without conscious thought. He grasped the hands that held his pillowed face down and _twisted,_ hearing a sharp cry of pain as he freed himself and drew in a delicious breath of lilac-laced air. His attacker slid off the edge of the bed to crouch in a small ball on the floor, cradling injured fingers to his chest. Eliot was on him in an instant, kicking him down so that he sprawled across the floor, and before he could fight back Eliot was on him, pinning him down with one hand holding the kid's wrists above his head, threatening to injure those long fingers some more. The kid went still, eyes squeezed shut on a pale, pale face; unkempt black hair seeping into the shadows beneath the bed. There were no sounds to be heard apart from Eliot's enraged breathing and a soft, pained moan from the other, but that too ceased as Eliot grabbed his sword from its place beside the bed and held its lethal point at the kid's stomach.

"Who the hell are you?" Eliot hissed, dangerous blue eyes narrowed in hate. The kid beneath him said nothing, moved nothing, saw nothing.

Enraged, Eliot trapped the boy's injured fingers within his own fist, threatening to crush them as he kept the sword steady on its target. The boy flinched, a single tear escaping dark lashes to slide down a soft, pale cheek, dropping unnoticed into the shadowed carpet beneath. Still, the boy refused to reply. Eliot let out a furious growl before discarding his sword so he could force the boy against a bedpost, one fist still clenching the intruder's hands, the other pinning the kid by the neck.

"Answer me!" Eliot shouted.

The boy said nothing.

"_Answer_ _me!_"

"_...calm down_."

The quiet voice took him by surprise, but Eliot's grip remained immobile. This was a trick; a trap designed to break out from under his guard; a scheme to escape. But Eliot wasn't going to let that happen. This sneaky little bastard wasn't getting away; not now, and _not_ from a Nightray.

"Who the hell are you?" Eliot repeated, eyes narrowing.

"Enigma."

Eliot nearly punched the kid in the stomach, but, deciding against it, slowly loosened his grip. "Enigma?" he said, suspicion evident in his lowered tone. "Prove it."

The boy smiled, and Eliot's skin prickled in immediate response. There was something seriously _off_ about the boy; something hidden in his eyes. The gleaming madness was gone, much to Eliot's immediate relief, but it had been replaced with a glitter of dark, subdued humor that was clear only to its possessor. Somehow, the kid seemed to be something more than he appeared, and his eerie, knowing grin was starting to make Eliot wonder if he truly had awakened from his dreaming or if this kid had single-handedly turned his entire room into a reality of hellish nightmares. Even the shadows, cast by the moonlight to softly envelop the boy in a protective embrace, seemed sinister in synchronicity with that smile. Eliot focused hard to keep himself from shuddering; he knew the kid would be able to feel it if his guard slipped and he didn't want to show weakness against someone so unreadable.

So _enigmatic_.

Something akin to victory glinted in the boy's eyes then, and Eliot was possessed by a feeling that the intruder _knew_ Eliot had come to that very realization.

It was more difficult for him to suppress the second shudder.

But the kid spoke, voice soft and low, smile fixed politely in place. "Proof is not easily given by one in my situation, you know. I doubt you'd listen." He chuckled to himself. "But whatever: page 303, Volume nine. The name of the street performer is Estelle."

Eliot regarded the boy with suspicion. "No, it's not. It's _Estella_. Get it right."

The boy grinned mischievously wider. "Estella in the printed version, yes. Estelle in the original manuscripts. The rough drafts."

"How am I supposed to verify that?" Eliot said, infuriated by the fact he was being so blatantly toyed with.

The boy, _Enigma_, shrugged. "That's not my problem. You either believe me or you don't. I don't really care what you decide." The grin had left his face, but his eyes still glittered in a most unsettling manner beneath a heavy curtain of midnight-black, unkempt bangs.

Grudgingly, Eliot released his bruising hold entirely, backing away enough for the boy to slump to the ground in a sudden, rumpled heap. "Fine. I believe you. Now what are you doing in my room?"

"Proving a point."

"That you know how to piss me off?"

"That I know who you are and where you live."

"So you broke into my room in the dead of night? Are you insane?"

"I hate being called a liar."

Eliot wasn't sure how to respond. Before, Enigma had been completely nuts; his facial expression only made it undeniably obvious. But now - now his face was devoid of any traces of his previous insanity. Now it was lucid: clear, open, and honest. His eyes were steady, earnest, liquid beautiful, and just as pissed off as Eliot himself was feeling.

"I hate you," Eliot spat. He was having a hard time forgiving this guy.

Enigma laughed. It was a soft laughter, with more shoulder shaking than vocal noise, but it held no trace of lunacy (Eliot was watching for it rather intently, thank you very much). He didn't laugh long, or particularly hard, but it was enough for the tension to melt from his countenance. He seemed more at ease with the admission, as if he felt more comfortable being hated than being called a liar. He brushed his bangs in front of his eyes, shielding them from view behind a thick, raven curtain, and timidly smiled at Eliot before replying, "I can live with that."

...

He had no idea how the rest of the evening transpired; all he knew was that he woke up in his bed (sheets a tangled mess around his legs, but that was normal; thrashing usually accompanied his nightmares) with the window closed (Enigma had opened it to get in, hadn't he? When did it shut?) and his sword absolutely where it belonged (Eliot didn't recall putting it back). He was bewildered; after zealously scouring his room for clues, Eliot had come up with a serious lack of verification that Enigma had been real. There was no proof of Enigma's existence, of their struggle, of entry into his room via an open window; there weren't even a set of footprints to be found in the soft soil of the flowerbed!

Thoroughly perplexed, Eliot had no choice but to ready himself for another dreary day at school. He sighed as he impatiently tugged on his uniform, still trying to discern the reality from the nightmare, but it was impossible: everything was so confused. Memories blurred and ran together in his mind like low-viscosity paint, mixing and spilling and puddling, clouding the portrait of truth. Grabbing his bags, he slung them carelessly over his shoulder, opened the door, and stepped into the hall. Taking one last cursory glance back at the interior of his unaltered room, something bright caught his eye. Doing a double-take, Eliot froze, staring intently at his computer screen.

But it was black.

Taking a deep breath to calm his racing heart, he carefully pulled the door closed behind him (expecting to see something strange and terrible leap out of the shadows while he did so) but nothing moved, save for the lilac bush slowly swishing back and forth in the breeze, flowers bobbing like the pendulum of a fragrant grandfather clock outside his window.

...

School was boring; he only went because he was expected to. An heir to the Nightray household was expected to become the epitome of success in everything that defined him and his career: financially, socially, academically. So he went to please his father's expectations, to live up to his family name, and to follow in the footsteps of his valedictorian brothers and sister. As expected, he made the highest grades, was president of the music club, was great at sports, was offered a million scholarships to the most prestigious universities upon his graduation from high school this year, was good-looking and gracious and noble and yadda yadda yadda.

_Expectations_.

He met them all. And because he met them all with the strong will and fierce determination that befit one of the Nightray house, he was often left bored: unchallenged. He read to fill the void. Admittedly, he hadn't been all that enthusiastic about reading when he picked up his first novel from the library in an attempt to curb the mentally stultifying effects of so many relentless hours spent daydreaming, but as he read he discovered another side of himself; a side that could be free, that could explore the boundaries of imagination without having to answer to absolute expectations dictated by the world around him. Unfortunately, he discovered his interest in novels waned considerably sooner than he would have hoped, but that was what had driven him to his online exploration of the _Holy Knight_ series (or, to his "online escapades", as Claude and Vanessa so often teased); he couldn't occupy himself with any other book, it seemed. Therefore, it may be said that Eliot wasn't just an avid fan of the book because of its riveting plot (that was part of it, true), but because he had a serious lack of interest in anything else he had come across.

Which is why he was startled to discover half of the library's _Holy Knight _volumes littered across the floor in a disorganized heap, with ripped and mangled pages strewn everywhere, intentionally left by the perpetrator to coat the floor in a disturbing parody of a thin layer of snowfall. Eliot didn't know what to make of the scene. On one hand, he had a deep-rooted sense of honor that ignited his fury at seeing such blatant vandalism of the academy, and he desired nothing more than to catch the saboteur and bring him to justice. However, the other side of Eliot was telling him to be cautious (for once in his irascible life); to be wary and alert, because it may not be mere coincidence that his favorite books were lying open and vulnerable on the floor, crumpled, torn, and bleeding.

He could have sworn someone was laughing from the other side of the shelf.

Carelessly, Eliot shoved the books on the other side clear off the rack, creating a hole between aisles for him to look through, but he saw no one. Disturbed, Eliot raced as quickly as he could to the other side, desperately searching the aisles upon aisles of books, convinced he was on the trail of the vandal. But he still saw no one; the entirety of the fantasy section was deserted. With his heart hammering loudly in his ears, his body perspiring, and his mind racing with agitated excitement, Eliot found himself at a loss for what to do. Running an exasperated hand through his hair, he sat down in a chair and collected himself, wondering if something was wrong with his mind. People didn't just vanish into thin air! But he swore the laughter was real.

Coming up with no good ideas, he decided to return to the aisle containing the mess of books he had pushed onto the floor. At least cleaning up the clutter would give him an opportunity to think; perhaps he'd even be fortunate enough to uncover a clue about the identity of the idiot who had torn up all of those good books. Turning into the aisle, Eliot stopped dead in his tracks. Someone was already there, picking up the books and reorganizing them in a neat and tidy stack at the base of the great metal bookshelf they had rained down from.

Sensing Eliot's movement, the stranger looked up from a half-crouched position on the floor, one slender hand gingerly grasping the spine of a fallen book, the other cradling three or four others in the crook of an elbow.

"Oh, hello," the person called cheerfully to him, smiling warmly. "I heard a crash and saw these books lying all over the floor. If you want one, I'll be out of your way in no time at all."

Eliot had no reply; he stood there, gaping. The stranger - this gentle-looking boy - had the same unkempt black hair; the same unruly, impenetrable bangs; the same pale, pale face and pale, pale hands and freshly bruised fingers as -

"Enigma?" Eliot croaked in a disbelieving whisper.

"No, no," the boy said with a laugh. "The _Enigma _series is back a few rows, written by Amelia C. Petrovia. This is the D section."

Eliot came closer to the boy, eyeing him warily. The boy's smile was genuine, if smaller now, but his eyes were hidden by a pair of impossibly large glasses that kept catching a full-lensed glare; there was absolutely no seeing what was beyond them. It was impossible for Eliot to know what color the boy's eyes were; no way to verify the kid's identity unless he acted. However, Eliot had learned from his previous encounter with Enigma: he couldn't be slow. He'd have to be decisive, ruthless, fast, and first if he wanted answers.

_Like his secret. Get the code._

Stepping in quickly, Eliot grabbed the boy and shoved his back against the bookshelf, forcing a forearm to the startled kid's throat while his other hand captured the boy's wrists in one swift motion. The books in the boy's arms fell to the floor and bounced open, their pages rippling and fanning and crumpling beneath Eliot's feet. Eliot pinned the boy to the shelf using his body weight and glanced down at the small, slender-fingered hands held securely in his grasp. The fingers were definitely Enigma's, dusted with various shades of bruising from the abuse they had received the night before. They must be tender.

Eliot forced the boy to look at his own hands. "This is proof, Enigma. These bruises? Don't even try to lie to me."

The boy choked, and Eliot grudgingly allowed him room to breathe. "I don't understand," the kid said. "I don't."

Pitilessly, Eliot applied pressure to the bruises, causing the boy to gasp and turn his head aside. "Don't lie to me! _Enigma_!" Eliot shouted, not sure why he was so unsettled.

"I'm _not_...!"

"I thought you didn't like being called a liar!" Eliot raged. _"I know who you are!"_

The boy's lip trembled slightly, but he quickly drew it into his mouth, biting it in an effort to make it stop. A single, unnoticed tear dripped down his face, caressing a soft, pale cheek before sliding off and vanishing into the carpet below. When he spoke, it was in a soft voice, so quiet it took Eliot by surprise: "Leo."

"What?"

"My name is Leo," the boy whispered, with dripping, acidic venom unmistakable in his voice.

"Leo? _Leo?_" Eliot spat back. "You expect me to believe you were named for some... some... _constellation_? Some astrological _sign_? That's even worse than Enigma! Can't you come up with something better?"

Leo shook his head. "I can prove it to you," he said, voice seething.

Eliot laughed mirthlessly, but relinquished his grip, nonetheless. "Do it," he ordered.

Leo's hands trembled as he reached into his uniform's coat pocket and extracted a compact, black wallet. Flipping it open, he passed it to Eliot with eyes downcast on the floor. If Eliot hadn't been aware of the boiling rage barely contained in the other's stance (the tense neck, tight shoulders, clenched fists, set jaw, square stance) he would have felt like a schoolyard bully trying to rob some kid of his lunch money. As it was, however, Eliot was just as pissed as "_Leo",_ so he took the wallet without a word and scanned the name on the three forms of identification contained within: driver's permit, Latowidge-issued student identification card, and a checkout card for the local downtown library. Each established the card holder as Leo, affirming the boy's claims.

"Happy now?" Leo asked bitterly.

Eliot handed the wallet back without a word. Staring intensely at the mirror-like lenses ornamenting the kid's face, Eliot sighed; this was getting him nowhere. As Leo irritably tucked the wallet back into his jacket, Eliot reached forward and snatched the glasses off Leo's face, pushed him back against the bookshelf, and took a good look at his eyes. They were as expected: sparklingly clear, liquid beautiful, and just as pissed off as Eliot remembered them being. Satisfied, Eliot pushed himself off of Leo and extended the glasses back to their owner. They were instantaneously seized back none-too-gently, and Eliot felt Leo's short nails scratch into his knuckles a little deeper than what could have been passed off as an accident.

Placing his glasses back on his face, Leo shook his head to flip his bangs in front of the lenses, effectively shielding his already shielded eyes from Eliot's view. "You are the most ill-mannered ignoramus I have ever met," Leo said.

Eliot opened his mouth to respond, but found himself staring only at an empty bookshelf; Leo had spontaneously vanished! "Dammit!" Eliot growled, clenching his hands into fists. How the hell did this guy keep disappearing? "_Dammit!_"

"What?" came a tired voice from below.

Eliot looked down in a hurry. Right in front of his shoes was Leo, casually sitting on the floor, picking up the mangled remains of forgotten library books with his slender, bruised hands; already cradling one or two in his arms. Not sure of what to say, Eliot watched Leo set a sturdy book atop one pile, smooth out the pages of a trampled tome, and then place a third novel in a separate stack. His movements were slow, deliberate, and careful, but Eliot could see the pain in Leo's face whenever he lifted a particularly weighty volume. Sighing in defeat, Eliot sat next to Leo, brushing the swollen fingers away, and placed the heavy book where it belonged. Surprised, Leo glanced up at Eliot, but Eliot refused to acknowledge the motion. Shrugging, Leo turned back to the stacks on the floor, and the two worked in silence until the job was finished.

...

Leo never confessed to the destruction in the library, nor did he admit to being Enigma. Eliot believed him on one count, but not on the other.

...

Leo proved to be an incredibly knowledgeable source of the most obscure _Holy Knight_ information fathomable, but he never once provided insights comparable to Enigma's style; actually, Leo seemed to stumble and falter when asked for his own opinion. He could spend all day prattling on about this or that on page whatever-and-a-half (it was obvious his memory was photographic, he didn't have to keep rubbing it in), but if Eliot asked for a personal interpretation of the vague scenario in the tunnel crossing arc, Leo would shrug, smile, and say he either didn't know or didn't care. This behavioral discrepancy confused Eliot, but he didn't push it; he had no desire to escalate their verbal arguments into physical altercations. There was no honor in picking on a smaller guy who couldn't fight back, after all.

For the life of him, Eliot couldn't figure out why Leo reminded him of his mother. Perhaps it was because Leo smelled vaguely of lilacs and had long, raven-dark hair swirling behind him when he spun around (usually with a tart retort, but whatever), that conjured memories of his mother's favorite black dancing gowns. Or perhaps it was in the frankness of his tongue; no sly subtleties or dripping ambiguities were to be found in Leo's particular pattern of stripped-down speech (Leo was not well-bred, that much was obvious). Whatever it was, Eliot couldn't pin it down, but decided it didn't matter much. Leo was Enigma and Enigma was Leo; the honesty of speech was there all the same (even if the matter of identity remained murky and unclear), and Leo had quickly become Eliot's first true friend.

_It wasn't an easy friendship, but it was friendship all the same._

...

Leo was obviously not a trained fighter. He was physically weak, but he wasn't defenseless or dumb. Eliot discovered (the hard way) that Leo's perceptive mind, sharp tongue, hair-trigger temper, and tendency to explode as violently and unexpectedly as a land mine made him one hell of a headache to deal with. (But that was only when he was dealing with Leo under ordinary circumstances.)

There were times when Leo would, without provocation, become a sudden amnesiac. He would prop himself up against a wall, settle down to read something-or-other of no interest to Eliot, and then abruptly sag over his book like a boneless doll and not remember the incident in the least. Or, he would argue heatedly with Eliot and say something particularly acrimonious; when challenged about the statement, Leo would profess absolute ignorance to its utterance. This baffled Eliot, as there seemed to be no external force influencing Leo's behavioral changes, but neither could such obvious swings in character be ignored.

The spells happened infrequently, but Eliot was quickly becoming tired of hearing Leo _conveniently_ claim innocence of the waspish arguments he_ clearly just made_. So, in an effort to discern the true nature of Leo's fluctuating character swaps, Eliot invited him over to his house.

...

He had expected it to storm: ominous weather to color the sky with big, billowing clouds of black. He had expected it to rain: saturated skies to burst forth a drenching deluge of face-soaking misery. Perhaps it would even cloud over in grays like a thick blanket, smothering the blue, darkening later to expose fierce, bright lightnings and thunder like the teeth of an angered, snarling wolf. He had simply expected foul weather to appear in some form or fashion; anything to thicken and stew the atmosphere in preparation of Leo spending the night.

To Eliot's disappointment, none of these things occurred. The sky remained cheerily clear, with the sun unhindered as it went about happily heating the afternoon air. Even the weather report called for nothing but the clearest of skies well into the evening; a perfect night for star gazing and other nerdy astronomical stuff like that (don't kill anybody in the mad rush to find your old set of binoculars, now).

Eliot sighed. For some reason, he had wanted the world to feel a little...scarier. More bone-chilling, like those horror movies he liked to watch on Friday nights with his older brothers when little Gil and Vincent finally went to bed. Eliot was trying to flush out Enigma, after all, and midnight insanity seemed a little more sinister with a backdrop of forecasted misery rather than sunshine and clear skies.

With a sigh of dissatisfaction (although he wasn't sure why) Eliot opened the door before Leo's (presently healed) fingers could hit the chime. Looking slightly surprised (as far as anyone could tell without ever seeing his eyes) he stood quietly on the doorstep for a moment before breaking into a shy smile.

"I guess I'm here," Leo said, shrugging as if unsure of how to act.

"Guess you are," Eliot answered, opening the door wider. He stood aside to let his friend enter, watching carefully while Leo took off his shoes. He needn't have bothered; Leo wasn't the type to fling his sneakers around carelessly and leave them scattered where others could trip over them.

"I brought dessert," Leo said, almost tentatively.

"Why?" Eliot asked, raising his eyebrows.

"I thought it might be a good idea."

"We have food here."

"I know."

"So...why?"

"Because it was nice of me. Quit being an ass, take it, and say thank you," Leo said.

Eliot chuckled and took the impatiently offered container, lifting the lid to peek inside. "Chocolate pie?"

"_Apparently."_

Eliot smiled and turned towards the kitchen, leaving Leo to scramble after from the entryway.

He never said thank you.

...

Dinner was good, the pie was great. The video games were boring, the movies dull. His brothers were obnoxious, his sister somehow more so (probably because he actually _had_ to listen to her; she wouldn't leave him alone until he did). Leo sat quietly through it all, answering questions in the simplest, most monosyllabic ways he possibly could, often looking as if he would rather be invisible so he wouldn't have to deal with the unnecessary attention. In a genius attempt to relieve some of the tension from the atmosphere, Ernest tried his hand at flattering Leo, aiming to make him feel more accepted as part of the family. However, Ernest soon realized the recipient of his attentions wasn't at all _female_; therefore, Ernest himself ended up being the target for the rest of that evening's teasing: a situation which seemed just fine with Leo and even better for Claude and Vanessa.

Eliot had enjoyed the company. Leo's presence (even if he intentionally kept his interactions to a minimum) somehow sparked a sense of life into the Nightray siblings that made him proud to have brought a friend over. Ever since their mother's disappearance, the siblings had each become increasingly reclusive, but this opportunity to entertain a guest seemed to bring back a sense of how things used to be.

Eliot couldn't help himself. He smiled.


	3. Chapter 3

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

... ... ...

Eliot awoke somewhere around three in the morning, drowsy and disoriented (a pleasant change from his usual nightmare-induced awakenings) but nonetheless irritatingly uncomfortable because he needed to use the bathroom. After yawning and rubbing his eyes, he blearily stepped over Leo's bundled form (they had camped out on the living room floor since neither boy wanted to share a bed, no matter how much Vanessa professed it wouldn't be as weird as they thought; _teenaged_ _girls did it all the time. _Yeah. But those were _girls_) and half-stumbled his way down the hall, trying his best to avoid running into any open closet doors along the way.

After he relieved himself of his discomfort and washed his hands, Eliot, still sleepy, splashed a bit of water on his face to keep himself cool. The worst dreams liked to creep upon him when he was too warm; he wasn't sure why. Patting his face dry on the peach colored hand towel, he habitually glanced at his reflection in the mirror with the expectation of discovering a tousled tangle of hair not unlike a shorter, blonder version of Leo's (except that Leo kept his hair untidy all day; Eliot only had bed-head _that_ severe after tossing and turning all night in a cold sweat and-).

The grin he saw was not his own.

Startled, Eliot wheeled around, finding himself face-to-face with a painting of a woman hung upon the wall for simple decoration: a beautiful girl in a billowing, lavender-and-lace skirt, picking lilacs as her caramel hair escaped her bonnet and blew behind in the breeze. Glancing quickly away from the image (a particular favorite of his mother's), Eliot's eyes swept the entirety of the bathroom. He found no one hiding in there with him.

_That's a relief,_ he thought. _It would have been a little weird if someone else was in here._ He let out a chuckle: soft, yet high-strung. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as he leaned against the counter, breathing deeply to calm himself. _It was just your imagination, Eliot. It's late, you're not in your room, dinner was that strange fish dad likes, and you're still half-expecting your best friend to spontaneously turn into some creepy psycho and murder you in the middle of the night. _

After a moment Eliot sighed, told himself it was silly to worry about dumb things that hadn't even happened yet, and turned off the lights. Opening the door, he strode through and attempted to regain his confidence so he wouldn't spook himself into having the nightmares he was trying his best to avoid. (How embarrassing would that be? With _Leo_ over? Only little kids had bad dreams!)

Eliot's stride was promptly interrupted by a solid body. He let loose a strangled gasp of surprise as he tried to regain his balance, but two small hands deftly shoved him backwards before he could do so. He landed hard on the tiled bathroom floor. "W-what th-?" he started to say, but didn't finish.

That grin_. It was that grin. _

"Enigma," he breathed.

"Enigma," the other boy confirmed with a near-pleasant smile.

Eliot held himself still for a moment. Logically, he knew he could take Leo in a fight; he had already proven this point twice before. But tonight there was something especially unnerving about the way Enigma smiled, about the way he deliberately pushed up his glasses while they caught and held onto meager strains of trickled moonlight from the hall windows, about the way he bent down to retrieve a hidden kitchen knife from its resting place against the wall. Eliot saw the metallic glint and swore.

Reacting to the danger as quickly as he could, Eliot half-rolled to the side, jumped to his feet, and charged Enigma like a football player, bodily shouldering himself into the smaller boy's midsection. He carried them both to a crashing stop against the opposite wall: a move which promptly spilled both boys to the floor. (Enigma let out a cry of surprise as he was hurtled backwards like a rag doll, and a cry of pain when his unexpected momentum abruptly ceased. Eliot let out a grunt as he carried Enigma, and another curse when the opposing wall refused to absorb his head.) Stunned, both boys moaned their discomfort on the carpet before Eliot snatched the knife from Enigma's slackened grip. Eliot swiftly sat back on his heels, holding the weapon behind his body and away from Enigma's grasp. Thinking better of it, he placed himself into a more solidly defensive stance, still highly conscious of keeping the serrated blade away from any danger which may cause it to bite into his flesh. Enigma continued to lay on the floor gasping for air as he stared dazedly at the ceiling.

"That's all?" Eliot asked incredulously after enduring a long moment in which nothing spectacular happened. "That was it? That's all you've got?"

Enigma wheezed.

"I can't believe this! I was actually afraid of you!" His laugh was nervous.

Enigma coughed in response, groaned, and rolled over, clutching at his stomach as he lifted himself into a sitting position.

"That's incredible. I mean, I thought you'd be a lot scarier this time. I was expecting something...grander. A struggle. A fight to the death. Blood. _Something_."

Eliot promptly quieted when Leo connected a fist to his lower jaw.

"SHUT UP!" Leo yelled, trembling in rage. "JUST SHUT UP."

Taken aback by the sudden strike, Eliot blinked in confusion and carefully assessed the damage wrought to his lower lip (it was split against his teeth, but not badly; Leo punched like a little girl). "What the-"

"Shut. Up," Leo hissed again, face dark and vehemently angry.

Eliot sat back on the carpet and did as he was told. He realized he was no longer facing Enigma. Enigma was psychotic; Leo was volatile. The boy trembling in front of him was just that: a boy. Not a demented, alternate personality with a lost sense of humanity; not someone who wore a twisted, eerie grin for the simple sake of contorting such a gentle-looking face. Eliot mentally breathed a sigh of relief.

Wishing to placate Leo, Eliot decided to pursue a new line of conversation with as non-confrontational a manner as possible. "What are you doing all the way over here?" he asked, trying his best to keep his tone curious, friendly, and non-threatening.

He received a glare in response, but eventually Leo decided to spit out an answer: "Finding you."

"Why?"

"You woke me up. I thought you were sick or something."

"So you followed me to the _bathroom_?"

"Like I said: I thought you were _sick_! I came to see if you were _okay_!"

"That's what _girls_ do!" Eliot screeched. "Guys don't do that crap!"

"Excuse me for caring!" Leo retorted.

"That's just wrong!"

"Get over it!"

"I will!"

"Fine!"

"Fine!" Eliot crossed his arms and huffed. Why did Leo have to be so awkward? _Wait a minute..._ Eliot thought as his eyes settled on his pouting friend. _He followed me to the bathroom. He couldn't hold even the barest threads of conversation at dinner. He brought his own dessert, and was uncharacteristically shy when I met him on the doorstep..._

"You've never been to someone's house before, have you?" Eliot blurted.

"So?" Leo challenged, posture rigid, daring Eliot to make a snarky comment about it.

"You don't have any friends."

"Do _you_?"

"That's not the point!"

Leo shrugged as if to say it didn't matter to him; he already knew the answer, anyway.

Eliot sighed and changed the subject. "Where'd you get the knife?"

"What knife?"

"This one!" Eliot displayed the weapon in question, irritated, but still careful to keep it out of Leo's reach.

Leo silently regarded the blade for a moment. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he said.

"You don't remember anything, do you?" Eliot asked quietly.

"I remember you waking me up. I couldn't get back to sleep so I went down the hall. You opened the door, and then I was on the floor and you were babbling all sorts of idiotic nonsense, doing a fantastic job of making me angry."

"How long were you waiting? I was in there for a while."

"I don't need to know the details!"

"I was washing my face!" Eliot roared, flustered. He couldn't see beyond Leo's glasses, but he knew Leo was rolling his eyes. _Whatever_. "The point is," he continued grumpily, "You don't know you're Enigma."

"I think I've already told you that," Leo spat, "at least a time or two before."

Eliot ignored the retort, continuing on because the disconnected puzzle pieces of his suspicions were finally being confirmed and the picture was making sense: "It means you're being _possessed_."

"What kind of ludicrous idiocy are you spouting now?"

"I've heard of it before. Possession. Although I don't know why your personality changes so much. Compared to _you_, Enigma's a sweetheart."

Leo met the comment with a dirty look. "Save your hocus-pocus for a campfire ghost story."

"Possession is real," Eliot corrected. "I've seen it."

"Sure you have. Because your mansion is _haunted_, is that it?" Leo didn't look the least bit impressed.

"No. There are no ghosts or spirits involved...nothing like that. Those things don't exist."

"Then what?"

"Chains."

Leo fell silent. Apparently he was already familiar with the term, and judging by the frosty look that crept over his face, his experiences hadn't been entirely pleasant. That worked well for Eliot; it meant he wouldn't be peppered with ignorant and foolish questions concerning things Leo had no business knowing and Eliot had even less business sharing.

"Chains," Leo repeated, sulkily.

"A single Chain, actually: Jubjub."

Leo looked up. "Jubjub?"

"Yeah. I knew it, once."

"You were possessed?"

"No," Eliot answered. His pale face was grim. "The contractor is my mother."

Leo looked at Eliot for a long moment. Eliot couldn't hold his gaze.

"Your long-lost mother's Chain possesses my body and makes me go insane?" Leo finally asked, tone skeptical.

"I've never seen a response as extreme as yours," Eliot confessed. "Usually people get a bit disgruntled, but they don't turn demonic. You're weird."

"Thanks a lot."

"Anytime."

Leo glowered before he leaned his head back against the wall and sighed. "This is crazy," he said.

"I know."

"I guess you do," Leo whispered. Then: "I'm going back to bed." He carefully stood up and wandered back through the dark, hardly moonlit hall, cautiously making his way through the heaping, disarrayed piles of blankets scattered across the living room floor without so much as glancing back at Eliot.

Eliot could hear Leo shuffling around for a few minutes, trying to get comfortable in his makeshift bed. He gave Leo a moment to settle down before following, making sure to step carefully over his friend, and quietly nestled himself in his own pile of blankets. Drawing his covers close, he sighed and closed his weary eyes, burying his head beneath a pillow. He tried his best to pretend he had successfully shut out everything around him, telling himself he honestly couldn't hear the unspoken questions emanating from the other side of the silent room.

...

Eliot had anticipated encountering a very distant Leo upon arising, but, as usual when it came to predicting the actions of the smaller boy, Eliot found himself irritated with his own erroneous judgements: Leo was positively _ebullient_ by breakfast. His smiles were bright, his laughter easy, and he animatedly involved himself in conversations he would have run in terror from the night before. Eliot wasn't going to complain (it was nice to see Leo smiling again), but it was _he_ who was unusually pensive and withdrawn, pushing piles of hash browns and scrambled eggs around his plate instead of enthusiastically digging in with his usual mealtime gusto. (Enamored by their guest's sudden friendliness, the rest of the Nightray household had yet to mind their middle brother's sullen countenance. Their lively conversations continued to revolve around Leo, and Eliot quickly became invisible on the outskirts.)

Eliot didn't mind being ignored; it gave him plenty of space to think without appearing as if he were tuning out his best friend in favor of daydreaming (spacing off into Eliot's La-La-Land; ha ha, very funny Claude, Earnest, _Fred_), and for that he was grateful. As it was, however, the idea of possession seemed ever more plausible when Eliot considered the way Leo and Enigma so abruptly switched dispositions. It was as if Leo was merely an actor changing roles; his body simply conformed to match the personality of the next corresponding mask. As such, the characters of Leo and Enigma could never meet upon their shared stage; the actor was only able to don one façade at a time. This severely dramatized the switch between the two personalities, giving the appearance that either (or both, depending how the situation was scrutinized) characters suffered a certain degree of memory erasure while acting as the other, when the truth was they never attained those "missing" memories in the first place.

In other words, Leo could not be privy to the happenings which transpired while wearing the guise of Enigma. "Leo" was, in essence, absent from the performance. Consequently, Enigma would have no knowledge of Leo. The two players belonged to the same body, but they didn't belong to the same mind: one was controlled by Leo and the other by either Jubjub or Eliot's mother (Eliot wasn't sure whose will was more accurately reflected during a Chainal possession, but he thought he saw more Jubjub than his mom in this particular instance; Enigma was a rather unnerving thing).

Eliot sighed. The entirety of the situation was perplexing to consider, but, in effect, the Chain-based character swaps (and hence temporary blackouts, amnesia, and nasty argumentative statements, among other things) were a result of the fact that Leo and Enigma were _not_ the same person.

Except they _were._

(But he already knew that.)

Eliot groaned loudly in confusion and ran a frustrated hand through his hair. His actions went generally unnoticed, but little Gilbert blinked and paused in his reach for the jar of peach jam to hesitantly ask if Eliot had wanted it first. Eliot, partially distracted, declined with a mechanical wave of his hand, so Gil began to enthusiastically smother a piece of toast, handing the finished slice to Vincent while he prepared another for himself. Eliot frowned at Vincent (the two of them didn't get along, but that was no surprise. _Nobody_ liked Vincent, save for Gil) but smiled when he looked back at Gilbert because the kid had somehow managed to get jam smeared all over his face.

...

"I've been thinking about Enigma."

"That's nice."

Venturing to control his immediate vexation (he had _already_ frustrated himself trying to figure this damned thing out, the _least_ Leo could as thanks do would be to cooperate and _listen!_), Eliot chewed the inside of his left cheek. He didn't need to be goaded into fighting with Leo right now (no matter how much he'd like to yell at the annoying brat); he had things on his mind and he wanted them discussed. Or at least laid out for inspection; Leo had a tendency to see things Eliot couldn't. (Leo was more analytical, more critical, more observant: able to spew out copious amounts of dry, dry facts whenever prompted. Eliot was more opinionated, and specialized in coming up with creative ideas, but that was besides the point. It just showed they were different.) Eliot only wanted to lay the cards on the table and let Leo make sense of the hand.

"I've been thinking about how he interacts with you."

"That's nice," Leo repeated, still not bothering to raise his gaze from the age-yellowed pages of his novel, much less grant Eliot any semblance of undivided attention. Well, that was fine with Eliot. He'd just keep talking until Leo had no choice _but_ to put the book down for lack of proper concentration.

"There's something wrong with you," Eliot continued.

"I thought you had already reached that conclusion."

"I'm not talking about Enigma as the _problem_."

"Then why'd you bring him up?"

"Because I want to talk about Enigma!"

Leo lifted his eyes and looked irritably at Eliot. "You're contradicting yourself, do you realize that? Maybe you should sort out your thoughts before you open that big mouth of yours and say more stupid things."

Eliot ignored the provocation. Leo resumed reading.

"You've been touched by the Abyss. You're an illegal contractor," Eliot declared.

Leo smiled, but it wasn't genuine. It was...disturbed.

"Not really," he said softly.

"What does that mean?"

"Just what it sounds like: I'm not a contractor. Not really."

"Then...how do you know about the Abyss?"

Leo sighed and carefully set aside his heavily dog-eared book. Silently regarding Eliot, he seemed almost ready to answer, but stopped himself before he opened his mouth to give voice to his story. He instead leaned his head back against the wall of Eliot's room and managed to _avoid_ catching the overhead light on his gigantic, mirror-like lenses. As a result, Eliot could clearly see his eyes. They weren't happy.

"The House of Fianna," Leo sighed with a halfhearted shrug, "did experiments. They made us kids drink this or that, forming a partial contract with a Chain. But I was different; I couldn't make the contract. I already had a legal one."

"You _what_?" Eliot asked, suddenly quite alert.

"My father used to work for Pandora," Leo continued bitterly. "He made me form a legal contract when I was young. It wasn't properly documented; I guess in that way it could be considered illegal; but the contract itself was quite legitimate."

"But you said you weren't a contractor!"

"I'm not. The illegal partial-contract cancelled out mylegal one and I lost my Chain. You can't hold two contracts at once when the methods are at ends with one another, and you're not considered a contractor without a Chain."

"That makes no sense. Legal contracts are made on a pendant, not a body."

"But the _contractor_ is the same. Even if you took someone else's pendant, you wouldn't automatically become the holder of his Chain. That much should be obvious."

"Oh." Eliot's eyes suddenly lit up with insatiable curiosity. "What Chain did you have? Was it strong?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

Surprised, Eliot looked at Leo, but the other boy had since closed his eyes. "Well," Eliot said slowly, "I guess that explains that, then."

"...you were saying?"

Eliot smiled. "Well, my idea still works. Jubjub's techniques produce more sinister results on you because it's reacting to the tendrils of Abyssal power leftover from your previous contract. I know it's true because regular people without contracts don't go nearly as batty when they're possessed. For them, my mother's will is reflected in their actions. But for you, it's more of Jubjub."

"_Marvelous_."

"Shut up, Leo."

"Your arguments are redundant. We had this conversation last night; didn't you already decide it was Jubjub then? What does it matter _how_ it works if we can't stop it?"

"Shut up!" Eliot repeated. He angrily threw a pillow at Leo's head, but in his haste to take action he had forgotten to take aim. The pillow missed by an embarrassing margin; Leo didn't even bother to flinch.

"Besides," Leo sighed, "while it's good to know your brain _does_ make connections-"

Eliot scowled.

"-I don't think your assumptions are entirely correct."

"Why is that?"

"Because I don't."

Eliot snorted. "That's hardly a reason, genius."

Leo smiled, but he refused to retaliate. Instead, he turned his attention back to the patiently waiting pages of his novel and instantaneously submerged himself beneath the waves of a world completely untouchable to Eliot. (For all Eliot knew, Leo could ignore an approaching _tornado_ if properly engrossed in a good book.) Having realized the futility of carrying on a conversation by himself, Eliot sighed, lethargically chose a _Holy Knight _volume for himself, and flopped on the floor next to Leo. It was in this manner the two best friends spent the remainder of the afternoon.

...

Leo had wanted to return home before he became an inconvenience; however, given the sudden, ominous darkening of the sky before dinner (the boys had failed to notice the storm's approach, having been completely entertained by fantastical journeys with missing maidens and territorial dragons and swashbuckling sword duels; and also whatever else was happening in the book Leo had been reading), Fred suggested that, since Leo's folks were dead and nobody at the orphanage expected to see him, anyway (Fred phrased the situation more politely, sure), perhaps it would be better if Leo simply stayed over for another night.

Eliot had no objections. Leo had _tons_.

Both annoyed and exasperated with Leo's unabashed attempts at escape, Eliot finally exhausted his small stores of patience. Clenching his fists, he angrily shouted: "_So, what?_ _I'm not good enough for you anymore?"_ His outburst was met with silence as all five of his siblings ceased their own activities and decided to pay _much_ closer attention to the proceedings of his discussion.

Leo blinked and took a mild step back. "Pardon?"

Eliot, upon realizing how his outburst had been interpreted by the others, flushed deeply. "Not good enough _company. _As _friends_," he restated, trying his best to not appear sheepish despite the fact his collar had somehow become a tad too warm and a bit too tight.

Leo sighed, conceding defeat with a shrug. He stepped out of his shoes and laid them back in line by the doorway. He attempted to ignore the awkwardness of the situation by plastering a positively cheery grin upon his face (Eliot swore he could see _flowers_ floating by the kid's head) and hopped lightly up the two steps leading towards the kitchen. "If I'm staying," he said with a smile, "then I think I'd like some crackers with that crabapple jelly. Want some, Gil?"

It only took a moment for Leo to disappear. In another, Gil hesitantly decided to follow, his timid steps immediately shadowed by the unconcerned stride of his little brother Vincent (predictably wielding the remains of a maimed stuffed toy, the creepy kid). The remaining four Nightray siblings said nothing as they watched the youngest two leave, but the grin which had so recently eased itself upon Ernest's face did nothing to help Eliot feel better.

...

"Aren't you afraid I'll turn into Enigma again?" Leo inquired as he propped himself up on one elbow, glasses off, facing Eliot's general direction despite his inability to see a thing with the lights turned off.

"No. Go to sleep."

"Are you sure? You seemed nervous earlier."

"I can handle you."

"Can you handle Psycho Me?"

"I'm still alive, aren't I?"

"That's true."

"And you're the only one who gets hurt."

"Also true."

"Then what's the big deal?"

"Nothing. Just worried, is all."

"About what?"

"You."

Eliot sighed and snuggled deeper into his blankets. "You worry too much."

"Like a girl?"

"Yeah. Like a girl."

"You only say that because you're insecure."

"Shove it." Eliot couldn't see the answering grin, but he knew Leo was wearing it.

Satisfied, Leo crawled under the protective cover of his own pile of blankets. He closed his eyes, wondering. He truly admired Eliot (for all he harassed him) and had always paid close attention to the changes in his best friend's moods, knowing very well Eliot was too stubborn to complain when something was amiss in his life. But, after all the time they had spent chatting over the Internet before they finally met in person (a time during which Leo had developed a fairly clear idea of who Eliot Nightray was on the inside) Leo wasn't about to be fooled by the seemingly unconcerned façade Eliot had recently donned.

He couldn't shake the suspicion that something strange was happening within the elder boy's mind; a persistent feeling which told him something was eating at Eliot from the inside. Whether it was a result of the pressures associated with living up to the Nightray name, or perhaps the grief that accompanied losing his mother to Isla Yura three years prior, Leo didn't know. But he felt sorry for Eliot, and felt terrible knowing the whole mess with Enigma (with _him, _as it were) wasn't easing any burdens.

Leo sighed. He reached the unsatisfying conclusion that he hadn't the least idea of _what_ to do or _how_ to help his friend, so he instead resigned himself to rest, hoping Eliot would have an idea in the morning. Pulling the blankets closer, he thusly drifted into a fitful sleep of worrying dreams and scrolling uncertainties even as Eliot snored softly beside him.

...

The colors swirled, twirling around like the billowing skirts of macabre dancers trapped in an eternal waltz, condemned to dance their lives away on an unearthly ballroom floor. As he watched, his vision swam, narrowed, blacked out, and reappeared, but through it all the dizzying colors remained forever the same. He felt trapped, as if he were imprisoned within a kaleidoscope, tumbling around and around with the colors while an unseen force jostled the device; but still, the colors remained separate, never changing, always rotating. As he struggled to understand his surroundings he stopped tumbling. He was now confined within the vivid, bright bounds of a continual game of ring-around-the-rosy, watching while the mocking dresses of colors (like laughing playground children) shrieked around him in spiraling circles.

It was making him feel nauseous.

He fell into the colors, fell through the colors, and landed in a vast ocean of dark, soft velvet. He stood; rippling, shimmering waves of velvet rolled off him, pooling fluidly around his feet. Grasping hold of a bundle of cloth, he tugged it aside, suddenly noticing a fleshy elbow buried beneath its liquid folds, lying still in this whirlwind of ceaseless, pinwheel motion. Dropping to his knees, Eliot clawed through the dark sea, searching desperately for the rest of the arm. Discovering the wrist, he immediately felt for a pulse. There was none. Fighting the urge to panic, Eliot scrambled to uncover the face of the person suffocating (_suffocated?_) beneath the layers of heavy cloth. He struggled and struggled, pulled and pulled, but no face revealed itself until the body had rotted and become nothing more than white, dust-covered bones. It was then when he finally pulled the last of the cloth from the person's body, and then that he screamed.

He had uncovered the grave of his mother. In his hand was her black velvet burial shroud, around his feet were piles of fresh dirt raked from her unearthed bed.

Around him dropped the bodies of those dancing colors, each falling with a heavy, sick thud. Some spasmed, some twitched, but all (_in unison, like skilled dancers_) laid eternally still while their bodies seeped through the floor, melting into glistening pools of crimson. He stepped back, hands shaking, voice denying, but still he couldn't escape the endless scene. The colors were dead, the colors were bleeding, and he was holding a screaming, accursed, rusting sword in his right hand (the hand that composed their death song on ivory-coated keys of fancy and whim) while soft rose petals rained upon his head. The sword corroded, falling away into a quill which dripped ruby red drops on the pristine marble floor, his fingers holding it tightly while the splatters composed for themselves a song of misery, death, and pain. He felt hot and watched as the blood-notes became fire, fire that raged around him, and now he was surrounded by flaming bodies and had no one to blame but himself, even as he listened to that terrible song and knew it was his.

Ashes, ashes.

_(They all fall down.)_

_..._


	4. Chapter 4

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

... ... ...

He gasped his terror into wakefulness, clutching constricting blankets while unseeing eyes snapped themselves open. He began to thrash his limbs in a moment of panic, trying desperately to unbind himself from the grasp of what he was certain was something vengeful and _dead_, noticed somebody was very near to him, noticed it was so dark and disorienting that he couldn't tell _who_, and noticed his mind wasn't in control of its own shivering self and he didn't even know fantasy from reality although it was still so _dark_ he couldn't see even if he _could_. His heart leapt into his throat while he bit back a strangled sound of fright, and slowly realized that the hands which gently captured and guided his own were warm, fleshy, and not skeletal in the least.

A voice whispered through the dark, ghosting hotly beside his ear. But it wasn't dripping that chilling venom of hatred; it was soft, soothing, and comforting. _"It's alright. It's okay."_

His heart refused to compose itself, preferring to continue its thunderous journey through his head and his ears while visions of red sparked themselves before him in vividly screaming luminescence, seeming as if they were maleficent fireworks aimed at his eyes. The blood. A boy. A dark-haired boy covered in blood, tears streaming down his cheeks as he sobbed and screamed and cried with such brokenness that Eliot couldn't stand to face what he had done...what _they _had done...

"It was a dream, Eliot," Leo said. His voice was quiet, his grip firm. It was enough; Eliot finally woke.

"L-Leo?" he asked, shivering, sweating, hot. Much too hot.

"Yes. I'm here," Leo said as he helped Eliot's trembling hands push off a tangled layer of sweat-soaked blankets. "I'm here."

Eliot nodded, knowing Leo was blind to the gesture in the midst of a midnight dark living room. Regardless, he knew Leo had understood, and perhaps even seen (in his own way), for a comforting hand was placed gently upon his shoulder. It was hard for Eliot to slow his hammering heart (his dreams were always so vivid and real...his emotions raced right alongside them; calming down took _forever_), but with Leo's silent presence there to comfort him, he was able to focus his mind on reality and away from the nightmares. Eliot shakily drew in several deep breaths, calming himself while the fingers of his left hand absently unfastened the first three buttons of his nightshirt. He tugged at the collar, drawing it away from his neck, and lay on his back staring into the dark at what he presumed was the ceiling and not the light fixture, as the latter should have been located more towards Leo's side of the room.

Remembering Leo (for the first time, really, since he finally had his wits about him), Eliot slowly became aware of a foreign warmth encompassing his right hand. After a moment of sightless confusion, he determined it was Leo's smaller hands enveloping his own, softly stroking in a rhythmic, soothing manner. Eliot almost opened his mouth to chastise Leo (to tell him that holding hands _wasn't in the least bit manly) _but discovered he couldn't choke the words past a sudden problematically dry spot deep at the base of his throat. Coughing slightly with the hopes of dislodging the obstruction, he closed his mouth and decided to say nothing at all, instead choosing to squeeze his grasp in return, tightening their mutual grip as a means of shyly letting Leo know it was all okay now.

He would be okay.

...

The campus breeze whispered several secrets, but Eliot didn't know its murmurings. Deaf to its gentle gossip, all he knew was that it wasn't nearly as cool outside as he would have liked, and he still had three more classes to suffer through before he could go home and change. Growling about the inconvenience of their damned uniforms, and wondering why the hell summer vacation didn't just hurry up and arrive already, Eliot miserably shuffled along a concrete path connecting the building of the school proper to its disjointed, ill-designed gym.

"He's not who you think he is," Xerxes Break murmured silkily, absently fiddling with several strings of Eliot's hair between his long, playful fingers.

Eliot stiffened and swiftly moved away, doing his best to evade any further attempts at physical contact. "What are you talking about?" he asked, keeping his eyes focused on Break, not wishing for the creep to slither behind him again.

Break's chuckle was flippantly airy as he focused his own attentions on unwrapping a small lollipop. "Oh, you know. Some child named Leo~," he said lightly as he discarded the cherry-colored wrapper by tossing it over his shoulder in a most unconcerned fashion. (Eliot winced, thinking the man had simply thrown his garbage onto the campus sidewalk, but was surprised to discover the wadded paper just barely landed in a nearby trashcan after bouncing lightly off the rim. He wasn't sure how Break had done that, with the breeze blowing in the wrong direction.)

"What about Leo?" Eliot demanded.

"Absolutely nothing, Nightray-sama!"

"But you just said-!"

A teasing laugh, a mocking _crunch _in response.

Annoyed, confused, and curious, Eliot pressed for answers. Xerxes Break craftily (_happily_) evaded, declining ever-so-politely to depart with any worthwhile statements. And although the older man laughed and continued to profess his sincerest ignorance in the most maddening manner possible, the grin which slid onto his slyly ambiguous face told Eliot they both knew otherwise.

...

"Break? Oh, ignore him," Reim said while readjusting his glasses. "He's only trying to cause trouble, like usual."

Eliot frowned, dissatisfied. "This morning Break told me something, but then he denied knowing anything about it! Is that a joke of his?" he asked, desperate for clarification, information, _anything_.

Reim paused a moment to consider, placing a gloved hand on his chin. "Well," he said, "that depends on the situation. What did he tell you?"

"That Leo isn't who I think he is."

Reim's face slid from contemplative to impassive. "Ah. Well." He paused to clear his throat. "I'm not exactly sure what Xerxes meant..."

"What?" Eliot asked anxiously. "Spit it out!"

A sigh. A shrug. A regretful glance. "I really don't know."

"Yes, you do."

Reim silently watched Eliot, his patient eyes searching. Weighing. Deciding. "If Xerxes Break didn't tell you outright, I'm not sure it's my place to do so," Reim admitted quietly. "I cannot betray his confidence."

"What a load of crap!" Eliot declared, incredulous. "You know something - you _both_ know something - so say it! Why else would he bother to bait me?"

Reim sighed, but like his older friend, solidly refused to answer (he did so in a much less obnoxious manner, but to Eliot it was just as vexing). Still looking genuinely regretful for his inability to be of any further assistance, Reim slowly gathered his paperwork, briefcase, and coat, and gently maneuvered past Eliot to resume his own errands. He left one furiously frustrated Nightray heir standing alone in his wake.

...

Reim carefully latched the door and leaned against it with a heavy sigh.

"My, my, Reim-san," Break said from his perch atop Reim's work-strewn desk, "you've been doing a lot of that lately. If you keep sighing so heavily you'll run out of air and turn blue like Emily." As an added visual emphasis to his remark, Break poked his miniature companion's head gently, letting her lean to the side just far enough for the movement to catch Reim's attention.

Reim narrowed his eyes in annoyance. "Why did you do that?" he asked.

Break raised an eyebrow and crossed his legs, placing his hands, one atop the other, upon his dominant knee. "What? Compare you to Emily?" he inquired with a curious tilt of his head.

"The _boy_, Xerxes. You mentioned the boy."

"Ah~, the mysterious little boy."

"Well?" Reim prompted.

A single, colorful wrapper crinkled loudly in the otherwise silent office. Break patiently extracted the sweet from its flimsy packaging and placed it on Reim's desk before dexterously pulling out another from the orange pouch behind him. He unwrapped this one more slowly, fingers dawdling along the ends of the wrapper, seemingly either unconcerned or uninterested with their topic of conversation.

"Well?" Reim repeated, crossing the room in two strides to stand in front of Xerxes.

Break unhurriedly placed one candy on Reim's lips, forcing Reim to take it from his hand, and gave the second to himself. Reim frowned. He had known Break for too many (_long and exasperating_) years to overlook the absent portions of this routine. Firstly, Break had neglected to _offer_ the candy, choosing instead to impose it upon Reim directly; secondly, Break wasn't crunching his own treat in his usual obnoxious manner. He was therefore contemplating how much of his schemes he desired to divulge, and the knowledge of once more being left out of the loop made Reim very unhappy with his white-haired so-called "friend".

"Xerxes," he said with a huff of impatience, forcibly stopping Break's fidgeting hands in the midst of their quest for another sugary treat. Reim certainly didn't want to grant Break any more time to stall; the Mad Hatter's contractor was known to delay his answers in the hopes that his conversational partners would become distracted by other matters and forget, thereby leaving Break with a perfect excuse to say nothing at all and change the topic of conversation whenever convenient.

With his fingers physically thwarted, Break simply looked at Reim, smiled a slow and roguish smile, and bit loudly through his candy.

...

It was several days before Xerxes Break tired of playing elusive and allowed Reim the opportunity to track him down; several days before Reim had any hope of extracting an answer to the question of _why_. Why had Xerxes leaked that sort of information? And why to Eliot Nightray? If his intention was to cause paranoia, why didn't he go straight for Leo instead?

As Reim approached, Break's sightless, pomegranate-jeweled eye twinkled in amusement; he had already anticipated Reim's forthcoming interrogation. "You really want to know about this, don't you?" he laughed, flapping his ridiculously oversized sleeves towards the location Reim was standing, acting sentry to Break's safely locked office door.

"I want answers, Xerxes."

"Oh~, you're being serious," he said in a melodious tone of voice that meant at least one of them _wasn_'_t_. Reim remained silent.

"Oh, all right," Xerxes said, taking a moment to unceremoniously flop himself into a nearby chair and comfortably stretch his booted feet upon the cushion of the other. "What do you want to know?"

"Why you told him."

"That should be fairly obvious, Reim-san."

"You know you see the world differently. What's obvious to you is obscurity itself to everyone else."

"You're either being philosophical today or you're being sarcastic."

"You should know how to respond, either way."

"Look who's being vague now!"

"Answer the question, Xerxes."

"So forthright," Break pouted. "It's rather unbecoming of you."

"Don't change the subject."

Break folded his arms (his nonverbal concession of defeat; it meant he wasn't trying incredibly hard to win the argument in the first place) and regarded Reim with a glowingly mischievous grin. "You know, the Nightray brat is trying to discover the truth."

Reim sighed. "I am aware of that much."

"He's not getting anywhere fast."

"I know."

"I don't believe he's smart enough to figure it out on his own."

"And that's why you told him."

"And that's why I told him."

"Because you knew it would only frustrate him. You validated his hypothesis that something was wrong with Leo - "

"Oh, like that part was easy to miss." Xerxes interjected, rolling his eye.

" - but defeated him in the process because you never bothered to correct him and point him out in the right direction." Reim finished smoothly, quite unbothered by Break's perpetually sarcastic interjections.

"More or less."

"You're cruel, Xerxes Break."

Break's answering grin was shadowy and large, partially hidden behind his right sleeve while he chuckled. Glancing up at Reim with a gaze too direct and intense for a man as unquestionably blind as he was, he murmured, "Yes. I suppose that I am, Reim-san."

...

"Master," Reim said gently while he closed the library's grand double doors behind him, listening intently for the soft scrape of wood upon thick, plush carpet to end with a definitive _click_. Master Rufus never much cared for unlocked doors; he believed it was too easy for unwanted ears to eavesdrop upon private conversations. Judging by the staggering amounts of information which could possibly be leaked from an estate as mysterious as that in the center of the Barma Dukedom, the master's cautious judgement was not one made in error; the damage wrought from treacherously slithering lips could be catastrophic for their carefully guarded position as one of the Four Great Dukedoms.

Of course, Xerxes Break thought Reim's fastidious insistence of ensuring all doors were bolted before beginning any sort of private conversation whatsoever stemmed from an unwarranted sense of paranoia ("Oh, Reim-san, _really_. Who would bother trying to get information out of you? You don't know anything!" _...I'm aware of that, Xerxes_), when in truth it was because his years spent as a servant to the Barma household had thoroughly ingrained the practice into his normal routine.

Receiving a distracted wave from one elegant hand, Reim was wordlessly bid forward to wait beside his master's desk until Rufus Barma finished whatever esoteric project he had chosen to place in front of himself today. (As it were, a certain fragile parchment was undergoing a bout of comparative scrutinization beside a sheaf of carefully scribbled notes. Another linguistic translation, it looked like, although Reim would be better able to ascertain its specific nature in an hour when the master left to take his evening meal in the small parlor adjacent to the dining room.)

After a few more strokes of an aged, feathered quill (a modern ballpoint pen, actually, but antiquated with a cleverly designed façade in the fashion of those old dip-pens his master was so fond of as long as they _never_ splotched, and this was as close to the perfect, non-splotching, old-fashioned feathered quills as his servants could unearth for him) Rufus Barma laid aside his accumulation of decrypted documents and turned to silently regard his servant. This was Reim's invitation to begin.

"Master," he said, standing smartly at attention and offering a salute, "Xerxes Break has - "

"I know," came the soft interjection. Barma's half-lidded brown eyes slid their focus from Reim's youthful face to alight on something far beyond the view afforded by the library's large windows. Reim recognized it as his master's preoccupied face, knowing it was one he frequently adorned when he was in a pensive mood. Rufus Barma had a habit of resting his eyes on unseeable places far past the physical iron latticework and creeping vines of the garden perimeter when he was mulling over intriguing pieces of information, searching for a way to file and categorize newly acquired knowledge into the larger, more elaborate scheme of things.

"Yes sir," Reim replied. He shifted his weight nervously and gave a quiet cough, trying his best to not appear as flustered as he felt. When Xerxes Break interrupted him, it was no big deal; ignore it and move on. But when it was his master (and it didn't matter _how_ long Reim had been his servant, it was still awkward whenever this happened), Reim couldn't help but feel ill at ease; one never perceived himself as someone entirely, _uselessly_ redundant until he was hired to report on the happenings of the world around a person as knowledgeable as Duke Rufus Barma. (It also helped that the Duke had a touch of foresight, but nobody discussed that openly. It was considered rumor within the great halls of the Barma estate, one of those stories that made up the mythology behind living in such an eerie manor with an illusionist for a master. Reim was fairly certain he was the only living servant to know such rumors were, indeed, true, even though the talent required no glassy pools of blood or lover's stolen tears in order to manifest: an idea which was so contrary to popular household belief that Reim was viewed by the other servants as naïve and unimaginative whenever he attested to its falsehood.)

"Would that be all?" Barma's quiet voice cut through the growing thicket of Reim's mental wanderings with sliding, razor-like ease.

Reim sighed and struggled to articulate his ideas into ever-elusive words. Finding the feat difficult, he pulled off his glasses and began rubbing them vigorously on his shirt, trying his best to not make them squeak in front of the master. (He needn't have bothered; Barma was still entranced by his view of nothingness beyond the restricted window of visible sight.)

"You desire to understand why," he sighed, voice soft and contemplative.

Reim's head shot up and his hands ceased their nervous, twitching attack on his lenses. Replacing his glasses with a serious countenance upon his face, he straightened (almost imperceptibly, but his master was _always_ watching; that bit of household rumor was _very_ truthful indeed) and cleared his throat. "Yes sir," he said.

Barma shifted in his seat and idly fingered the decorative fan which he had hitherto ignored upon the glossy surface of his writing desk. Fingers playing lightly on the scrollwork edges, he said almost absently, "The child is a peculiar anomaly."

Reim frowned. That much was obvious.

"As such," Barma continued, "there remains a fair possibility he is linked to an intrigue of great interest to our friend, dear Mr. Hatter. Especially considering the origins and manifestation of his condition; the interaction between Enigma and his host is _invaluable_ to Xerxes Break, should we say."

"...Sabrie," Reim whispered.

"Exactly."

"But we don't know if Leo really is connected to it."

"No," Barma agreed, dark eyes sliding from the window to once again rest upon his servant, "but the fact remains: this child has been tainted by such curiosities. He very well may have been involved, one way or another, and Xerxes Break will not stop until he discovers his truth."

"He's trying to speed up the process by pushing Eliot, isn't he? Trying to use their friendship to get as much information out of Leo as possible."

Barma smiled faintly, wordlessly encouraging Reim to continue, half-lidded gaze watching with amusement as the pieces clicked into place for the younger man.

Reim continued, eyes brightly wide and excitedly lit. "He knows what Enigma is, and that he only appears for a reason! And specifically to Eliot, at that..."

"Go on."

"But that leads to the part which doesn't make any sense whatsoever. He's influencing Eliot... but he's doing so in entirely the wrong direction. He's letting Eliot believe Enigma appears because of a Nightray Chain. He hasn't told Eliot the truth."

Barma chuckled as he flipped open his fan and began cooling the air, gentle rolling motions of his wrist swirling stray wisps of his long, red hair away from his face.

Reim blinked for a moment and sighed. There would be no more answers this way; Rufus Barma was obviously quite finished speaking, preferring to let events transpire _without_ Reim's interference. But there was one thing he knew for certain: the Duke of the Barma household knew exactly which answers Reim sought.

He just wasn't sharing.

...

Eliot sighed heavily and slid down his seat, unbelievably bored. It appeared as if Leo was late for their customary after school chat. That was unusual. Well, no, it actually wasn't; he was probably wrapped up in some book or another, and had lost all track of time. Eliot halfheartedly clicked his mouse on several random discussion threads, trying to find someone interesting to talk to while he waited for Leo to show up. Discovering a topic of relative interest, he joined for a few moments, blasted a few Edgar-lovers (doing so always made him feel a little better), and logged off when he noticed his old rival, ZZ, had joined. _Bastard_, Eliot thought smugly. _Looks like you managed to steal today's code. Too bad you don't know I've got permanent access, thanks to Leo._ He laughed a short, barking laugh which resonated with bitterness for his former rival, and began searching some more for Leo.

...

_You are such a nerd_, Eliot typed the moment he discovered Leo had logged on.

_/And you're a bozo, but I don't complain about that all the time._

Eliot laughed, happy to know nothing bad had happened to Leo. He must have been captured in the enticing embrace of the arms of some novel. _Hey, did you hear about the school's debate club? They're thinking about picking apart book three of the HK series, just as a fun challenge to end the year._

_/You'd like to join, wouldn't you?_

_So would you!_

_/No. Too much work._

_It's not work! You already know everything in it! Plus loads more!_

_/But I'd have to argue with idiots all day. I already do that; you won't leave me alone._

Eliot glowered at the screen. Yes, it appeared as if Leo was feeling just fine.

...

A dark blue dress swept over cold stones with nary a whisper of a breath. Black-tipped high heels clicked as the woman made her way down the erratic twists and turns of the dungeon halls, never stopping, sure of her way though she'd never actually traversed it before. Her white-laced gloves reflected mildly in the flickering torchlight, and she was thankful they hadn't become sooty. It was terrible finding such beautiful gloves in her size; however her host had come by them she was entirely ignorant, but no less grateful. His generosity towards her had been nothing less than kindness itself for the entirety of her elongated stay.

Reaching the end of a corridor which looked identical to several others in this forgotten corner of the underground, she paused to reflect. Remembering, she slid her fingers into a crevasse hidden in shadow, discovered a subtly concealed notch, and strode through a thereby revealed door. It immediately slid shut behind her with a sound only a bit louder than the hissing of the dragging hem of her dress as she made her way across plush carpeting (scarcely a minute late for their meeting) but still early enough to seat herself comfortably; her host had yet to arrive.

Humming softly to herself, she glanced around the subterranean library, cooly taking note of various objects of interest: glinting, archaic swords; obscure samples of darkly painted artistry; wax-coated skulls of various beasts, some of them human; lovely, lifelike dolls skewered with rusted pins and needles; and other miscellaneous artifacts used for clandestine, cultist rituals. A younger version of herself may have shivered with trepidation for being left alone in such an isolated place, surrounded by mysteries of the forbidden. But she was a sagacious woman now; the eerie, decorative clutter only provided her with insight as to the nature of her host, not to the nature of their discussion and her possible role in it all. No, she had nothing to fear from these collectors items, nor from their eccentric collector, but now that she knew he had a particular weakness for such things...

Her smile was sweet as she rose to meet her benefactor. Through the profusion of his apologetic exclamations he never saw the mischievous light kindling behind her shrewd, slate-blue eyes.


	5. Chapter 5

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

... ... ...

Duchess Nightray was not a woman to be idly trifled with. Neither was she a woman one could easily deceive. She was smart. She was sharp. She was ruthless, ambitious, coldblooded, and cruel. She demanded respect and respected those who rose to meet her lofty expectations. She was to be treated as a queen - _nothing less than the best!_ -and this was the most allowable compromise she would condescend herself to consider. Her demands were met with poise and elegance, not because of her graceful beauty or her dignified eloquence or her refined manner and charm, but because her wishes were demands and demands ignored ended up as corpses which could not be.

Isla Yura was not a stupid man. He was well acquainted with the ways of the genteel Duchess. As long as he graciously bestowed upon her the proper solution to every little trifling matter or desire, the Duchess Nightray would contentedly keep herself out of his way. And while this most _charming _example of a well-bred woman believed she was being treated with all the pompous grace and dignity she _deserved_, she would continue to be easy enough to manipulate.

(However, if she proved troublesome, there was always an additional weakness to be exploited. It was a considerably fortuitous circumstance indeed that he had ended up housing the woman who had borne such a prominent Nightray heir. Using the boy as leverage against his mother could prove rather profitable, should things come to that. But, as Isla Yura was not a stupid man, he desired of all things not to complicate simple matters; he already had far too much to do. There were simply too many unfinished things on his agenda to devote more time than necessary to a woman who was easier to deal with when she wasn't causing him extra migraines.)

"My darling, my darling!" Isla Yura cooed as he grasped the Duchess' white, lace-gloved hands. Her fingers were cold through the barrier, but he had expected as much; there was no heat to be found in the heart of a glacier such as she. "I apologize for my tardiness! Where has the time gone?" he continued with a wail, feigning the most heart-rending distress. (He was scantly three minutes late.) "I am so glad you arrived safely, Madam, and I would love to escort you to a more comfortable seat, should you be so inclined!"

The Duchess bowed her head to the side and curtsied with a gentle smile, closing her eyes and laughing. "Why, my good man," she said, "I think I should like nothing else, should you be so pleased."

"Indeed," he said. He led her away from her seat at the mahogany reading table to a plush, red velvet chair set before the fireplace, making all manner of fuss over her until she was comfortably settled. Motioning for a servant to come forward with two glasses of a deep, crimson wine, he seated himself lightly on a chair beside her and dismissed the servant. He could handle the proceedings from here.

Isla Yura was not a stupid man. He didn't waste time dallying around. And now that the servant was dismissed, they could skip past the charade and get to business. "You've heard, I assume?" he said, his tone switching from its former gaily enthusiastic warble to a softer, more conspiring sort of thoughtfulness.

The Duchess' slate-blue eyes gleamed sharply in the firelight. "About my son's newest acquaintance?"

Isla Yura nodded, his own eyes seemingly distracted as they peered deep into the pulsating heart of the flames. He highly doubted the woman beside him knew of the mirrors hidden within the fireplace; Isla Yura was intently watching his guest, closely monitoring her every move. Her pleasant countenance gave nothing away. He was not fooled.

"I have indeed heard," she said.

"Good."

"Could that possibly be the reason you have summoned me to such a strange chamber, my kind host?"

"Indeed, Duchess. For your bird-Chain could be an irreplaceable asset in the furtherance of our endeavor. And here, no one will find out about our secrets."

She raised an eyebrow. "Is that so? I thought it was a rather large room with plenty of places in which one could hide and listen."

"No tricks, my Lady. There is only you and I to discuss this matter."

"You are leading me to believe there is more to this story than idle chit-chat about the welfare of my son and his newest friend."

"Indeed. For my former countryman, that Rufus Barma, is _also_ interested in the matter."

"Is he now?" she smiled. "Well, I see what it is you wish of me."

"I am pleased that you do," he nodded. "Do you think it possible?"

"You underestimate me."

"I do apologize. I hope you will forgive me for my error?"

"Of course, my gracious host. Of course."

The Duchess Nightray was not a woman to be trifled with, and Isla Yura was not a stupid man. It was precisely because they had spent the past three years living beneath the same roof that caused neither to trust the integrity of the other.

_..._

"Famous classical musicians from the time before the Tragedy? _What?_ 'Include a list of composers, performers, symphony orchestra conductors, etc. totaling no less than thirty in number. Due Friday. Remember to cite your sources; there may be an essay.'" Eliot read as he scratched his pencil noisily across a rumpled piece of paper.

"_What?_" Leo echoed, pouring himself a glass of juice from the Nightray's refrigerator. He had become a regular weekend visitor, not usually staying the night unless weather conditions were extraordinarily bad, but he still came over often enough to integrate himself into their mismatched family. Younger than Eliot, older than Gil and Vincent, Leo seemed to fit right in as a younger-older sibling. He had long forgotten his shyness, gradually dropping his own defensive barriers to accept _himself_ as a part of the family, and had even mustered the courage to show off a time or two for the others.

(But he wasn't one to brag.)

...

The magnificent grand piano which Eliot's mother used to stroke so very tenderly when Eliot was a small child (a particularly rambunctious thing oft in need of settling down before bedtime) had stood stoically companionless for the past three years.

For a time, Vanessa had taken piano lessons, hoping in her young naïvety to fill the void which had descended so tangibly upon the house in the first year of their mother's absence. She was a natural, a budding artist, but her expert touch of paint upon canvas did not translate to expert strokes of fingers upon ivory. Her attempts at music had tapered off after Eliot stormed down the stairs one drizzly afternoon to tell her to knock it off, playing the same damn song all the damn time until three in the damn morning was not going to make her a better player. Vanessa had indignantly sniffed at him, slammed her hands upon the keys, her music book upon the floor, and her feet up the stairs to her bedroom. Earnest had immediately chased after her to calm her down, but his efforts were chased out by a screaming teddy bear; he was left with a bemused moment's hesitation before turning around to lecture Eliot instead.

Vanessa's endeavors to master the piano had ceased shortly thereafter; however, this was secretly a development which brought the rest of the siblings relief, as even little Gil had once confessed to Eliot in the privacy of his room that Vanessa's lack of talent was hurting his ears, but he didn't want to hurt her feelings by asking her to stop. Vincent had laughed merrily while elaborating upon Gil's hesitantly told story, cheerfully recalling the number of times Gilbert had buried his head beneath his pillow to escape Vanessa's cacophonous symphonies. Vincent's mirth could not be contained, despite receiving reproachful glares from both older siblings, and he hummed to himself while he picked up a pair of golden scissors and snip-snipped away his happiness as pieces of dismembered animals fell to the ground in soft _whumps_ like clumps of snow from the boughs of sun-warmed trees.

Vanessa aside, there was a time where even Fred had taken piano lessons. However, that had been while he was in elementary school, and he had since become so rusty and out of practice that he had all but forgotten how to read the notes. Neither Gil nor Vincent had learned to play, and therefore could do no more than plunk jointly at randomized keys whenever they felt the urge to do so. As for Claude and Earnest, they had both chosen to pursue musical instruction in areas fairly unrelated to the piano. (One had decided to explore both the orchestral cello and bass while the other opted for the tuba and turned out to be a tenor in choir. Both had since given up their pursuits in search for more interesting hobbies, such as street racing and girls.)

And then there was Eliot: the one Nightray child granted the gift of actual musical talent, no matter which instrument he chose to try. But he had lost the will to play after his mother left, loathing both sound and sight of her former treasure, choosing instead to ignore it as much as possible.

He didn't even compose much, anymore.

So a shared, dubious cringe understandably passed between six of the seven Nightray siblings when Leo spotted the neglected, forgotten piano and remarked upon it with eager delight one afternoon. "Does someone play?" he asked, enchanted with the prospect of listening quietly while gentle waves of harmonious warmth filled his heart and soul like nothing else could. He moved over to inspect the instrument, poking at its sleek, black exterior, drawing several flowing, curvilinear designs through the accumulated layers of dust.

Eliot shared one more covert glance with his siblings before swallowing his matching grimace. "No," he said, trying to sound uninterested so Leo wouldn't discover his anxiousness. "Not since Mom left." His voice was tight at the admission.

Leo looked crestfallen for a moment. Glancing from Eliot to the piano, he contemplated his doodles in an almost mournful manner before whispering tentatively, "Well, may I?"

The siblings looked at one another. They really didn't want to offend, but...

"Please do," a small, cheerful voice piped up from the end of the table. Six heads turned around in disbelief.

Vincent was still smiling, his mismatched eyes gently bidding Leo to take a seat and try his hand at the damnable instrument.

That was all the permission Leo had needed, it seemed. As long as somebody presented the opportunity, it didn't matter if it was the youngest Nightray or the eldest; he'd take the words as a green light and begin before he had reason to back out. Seating himself on the dusty stool, he frowned and asked, "Is it tuned?"

"Yeah...," Eliot gulped. He heard Fred and Claude groan synchronistically, even as Earnest let out a long sigh which fluttered his bangs. "It's...still tuned."

"Great," Leo nodded, rhythmically flexing his fingers to warm them up. Removing the dust cover protecting the glimmering keys beneath, he cautiously plunked at a few, listening intently for the tell-tale warbling of an ill-tuned note. Satisfied, he plunked at a few more, nodded, and drew in a deep breath. Releasing it, he began to play.

...

"Curious, isn't it?" the Duchess mumbled to her companion, sweeping her skirts into a comfortable hold as she walked, doing her best to keep them from dragging unnecessarily through the sullied walkway.

The gentle maid tilted her head to the side in a manner almost avian-like in appearance. "Is it, my Lady? Is it curious?"

"Yes. That even Duke Barma is interested in the children."

"I see! So, you're interested because it means he _doesn't_ know something! How grand, to know something the Duke does not. How very grand, indeed."

"Well, I'm not sure about that, my darling."

"Oh?"

"Duke Barma knows _everything_."

"Then why is he curious?"

"Perhaps because he wants to see how well the rest of those idiot pawns at Pandora will carry out his little game."

"Oh. So he's waiting to see if they all do what he thinks they'll do?"

"Yes. Although," and here the Duchess smiled. "He doesn't know _we're_ players, too."

Isla Yura was a blundering buffoon, but he wasn't stupid. He was careful to work their plans underneath any potential detection by Barma's radars. It wouldn't do to have such a powerful Duke trifling with their affairs, even if the attitude of Barma was to merely observe; certain _people _knew how to pull his strings and cause him to act, and that situation could quickly become troublesome. (The Duchess Cheryl Reinsworth was one such obstacle they would much rather avoid, although it was fair to assume she would politely keep her antediluvian nose out of this one.) However, the wild card seemed to be that Xerxes Break was already a step ahead of _everyone_, overambitious fool that he was, and if even Barma couldn't altogether guess what was up those ridiculous white-and-purple sleeves, there could be trouble later for Yura.

The gentle maid abruptly shrieked, the noise high and shrill. Crystal windows shivered in their braces, frightened. The sound was oddly inhuman.

The Duchess smiled, successfully brought from her momentary abstraction. She leaned over and patiently patted the maid's pretty head with a delicate, lace-gloved hand. "Yes," the Duchess said, as much to herself as to her companion, "It is quite funny. Oh, it is, isn't it, my lovely Jubjub?"

The maid screeched again, and this time her laughter was joined with that of the Duchess Nightray's.

...

"Pre-Tragedy...," Leo said slowly, sipping juice from his liquid dark cup while bright, hidden eyes slid themselves into hypnosis.

Eliot sighed and threw his pencil on the table, giving up. The _clack-clackclack_ jolted Leo from his ruminations, fixing him squarely back into the present.

"I hate this class," Eliot fumed. He crossed his arms and put his feet on the table, radiating defiance, glaring rancorous distaste at the offending worksheets flung off to the side.

"I know," Leo chuckled, setting down his glass.

"Why do we have to learn about history, anyway?"

"You don't appreciate the past enough for their liking."

"Who the hell writes about dead composers?"

"You, if she really makes you do an essay."

"But what does it all _mean_?"

"What? The music, the appreciation, or the history?"

Eliot glowered at his homework, willing his eyes to bore sulfurous holes through disagreeable, white surfaces, damaging ink-printed words with the force of his willful ire and distaste. "No," he mumbled. "Never mind."

"Nevermore? Poe?"

"Never _mind_."

"I know. But I'm really glad I'm not in your class."

"Thanks a bunch."

Leo smiled. "Just ignore the entire thing," he said cheerfully. He hopped off his seat and procured a bowl of strawberries from the refrigerator. Handing one to Eliot, he happily sat himself on the counter, looking down on the paper-strewn battlefield that was once a kitchen table from his perch above Eliot's shoulder. "Your grade is high enough as it is, Eliot."

"I can't compromise my position as valedictorian."

Leo scoffed as he bit into a particularly succulent berry. Licking the escaped juice from his palm before it ran down his sleeves, he swatted the back of Eliot's head with his free hand. "You? Lose it?"

"Exactly," Eliot sighed, half-heartedly flapping his wrist in the direction of his discarded pencil. The lazy action did nothing to lure it closer to his waiting hand, so with a groan of displeasure Eliot stood up to retrieve it, never noticing the glimmer of light which caught and held itself unnaturally still on Leo's lenses, even as the boy hopped off the counter again to find some sugar for his rather tart berries.

...

The Nightrays had been stilled to silence as Leo's fingers moved across anticipatory ivory keys, drawing forth forgotten memories with a moon-like, etherial pull; half-formed reminiscences fell as snowflakes before their eyes, ephemerally shimmering, ghosting away as quickly as they had come when the next ribbon of notes breathed itself new life. These visions melted away when the gentle harmonies exhaled, but by then the siblings found they themselves couldn't. They couldn't.

They hadn't expected to hear anything remotely resembling music spill out of the forlorn piano since Eliot had turned his back on it nearly three years ago. They had expected their rumpled-looking visitor to carry a euphonious touch even less. He was almost as good as Eliot.

Leo played gently, closing his eyes while he swayed with the rolling ebbs and flows of his chosen melody, oblivious to the people staring at him. In his mind's eye, he was lost in the tide of _somewhere_ _else_, sweetly cradled in the embrace of someone warm and safe, held tightly in arms of gentle light while he surrendered his death-diseased heart to a presence of loving acceptance and peace. He was nestled securely in a place of lullaby dreams and sweetened softness, where happiness and laughter rained from an ever-flowing fountain, and comfort surrounded security in this dreamlike life without fear. The arms of his own mother (what he recalled most was her vanilla-and-rose scented perfume) encircling him as he taught himself how to play on their old electric keyboard; the hearty laughter of his father, proud of his young son's accomplishments. He was taken back to a time when the world was safe, when music flowed, and laughter sang in perpetual accompaniment.

But then: a sour note.

Leo's eyes opened with a grimace, but he refused to cease his song. Instead, he focused his attention on the precise movements of his fingers, intensely watching as they flickered along the length of cold, hard keys. When the next wrong note was hammered, piercing through his mind like the edges of a jagged wineglass, he sighed, turned around, and scooped little Vincent into his lap. Curious red and yellow eyes stared back, but the self-satisfied grin never faltered from the youngest child's face.

"You wanted to play, too?" Leo asked.

"Vincent!" Vanessa's reprimand was sharp, her voice cracking through the air like a bullet on impact, destroying any tarrying vestiges of Leo's long-buried memories of comfort and love. "Leo was playing! That was very rude of you! Apologize right now!"

"I'm sorry," Vincent replied in a soft voice. His eyes slid down as if in guilt, but his smug little smile remained.

Leo smiled in return. "It's really quite alright." He turned back toward the keys and gently placed Vincent's tiny hands underneath his own, guiding the child's fingers to poke at a few notes. "You wanted to play?" he repeated.

Vincent shook his head, retracted his arms, and leaned back against Leo's torso with a contented sigh. "You're the same as me, aren't you?" he whispered, eyes falling shut with a drowsy heaviness. Leo had to lean in closer to hear his last sleepy mumbles. "Nobody wants you, either."

Leo looked at the child in his lap a moment before placing his own hands upon the keys again, softly continuing his interrupted song from the place where it had broken. "Yeah," he whispered back, knowing the spell was shattered and only the curse remained. "I guess so."

...

Work had been difficult for his father during that last year their family was together. Leo didn't remember much about it, except that the fountain of smiles had gradually dried up and the laughter became harder to find. The three of them plunged into a desert of sand which stung Leo's eyes each night before bed. He spent his days trudging through emotionally degenerative dunes devoid of warm touches, proud hugs, and rides on broad, strong shoulders. There was nothing left to them but misery. Mother succumbed to the sickness; Father to sickness of another sort; Leo to sickness of heart. After Mother died, Father became ill in his mind, and he started to talk to himself. At first, Leo didn't mind; Daddy was keeping himself company, talking out loud to Momma. But Momma never responded, and soon Daddy's laughter turned bitter and he became angry and threw things at the walls. He never hurt Leo, never ever Leo, but the bouts of violence frightened him enough to cower in his room when Daddy came home in a foul mood.

Daddy left work at Pandora. Turned in his rights to be a contractor.

Some days were worse than others. Sometimes Leo could almost believe they were a happy family again - just the two of them, father and son - because Daddy's eyes were clear and his talking to himself had stopped after he quit his work. But then Leo discovered the truth, stumbling one night into something he was never meant to see.

_Chains._

The madness swallowed his Daddy, took him to the Abyss. Leo knew what the Abyss was; his own Chain had already told him. Daddy made sure his Chain was different, though: his Chain was legal. It had hurt. It had been scary. But Daddy had said it would be alright once it was over, and Leo had believed him. But that thing that swallowed Daddy wasn't legal. It wasn't Daddy's Chain. It was...something else.

His father soon disappeared, a screaming mess of wounded death and betrayal, and the child was left alone in the care of some monstrous creature from another dimension. Leo hadn't meant to stain his hands with blood like his Daddy before him, but looking back on it, it was a fairly inevitable outcome. Chains were brutal like that.

Nobody discovered the truth about him, and he never was caught for it. But as soon as his disheveled little urchin self was discovered sneaking around the park late one night, running barefoot through the mud and the brush clutching a piece of stale, stolen bread, the authorities brought him to the House of Fianna. He was well cared for there and the place was a place of smiling-happy, of warm-safe and trust-love. Or, it was until he smelled the sinister breath of rot from beneath the cover of minty, ill-fitting facades.

They forced him to drink it. He resisted with all his will. But his focus was divided: he had to keep his Chain back, _back_ before it destroyed those who were fighting against _him_. He didn't want any more deaths. But when his Chain stopped resisting his efforts and instead began to react to them in thrashing, harried panic, Leo lost control and one of the women ended up dead. (They made him drink it anyway.)

The pain was unbearable. His Chain was ripped away from him; he couldn't tell if his screams were the ones ringing so terribly in his ears or if they were his Chain's. Either way, excruciating agonies mixed and mingled, running together in one horrendous stream of rushing, ebbing, fluctuating, sobbing...

Holding his blood-splattered hands to his blood-splattered face, crying in untold misery, wailing more from the frozen, empty sense of loss than the physical pain itself, he rocked himself like the child he was until they forced him away to his room. His Chain - his comfort - gone. His life - taken.

The piercing stab of seared, darkened flesh upon his breast dulled as the clock's hand moved twice and then stuck. (He knew what would happen.)

_The clock disappeared over time. He was careful not to let the others know. This was his secret. His._

_Shh._

_..._

The Nightrays had been stunned when they first heard Leo play, but they warmed to the sounds of that shining, grand piano as it filled the house on a semi-regular basis. When the soft notes drifted from the instrument beneath his touch like a melodious breeze, the family would gather around like so many children back at the House of Fianna. He would play; they would listen. He would dream; they would reminisce. He would sway gently; they would still their breaths, so afraid to move.

Each would think sweetly back to happier times of gloriously fountaining love and laughter as the music connected their hearts in a patiently woven string of happy-sad sorrow.

The net of memories was always so bittersweet.

...

It had been close to three years since Eliot had last dared touch a piano. He was hesitant at first, afraid the cold, black and white keys would fight him because of his betrayal, leaving his fingers frostbitten and raw long before flesh kissed ivory. But, he had noticed how lonely Leo seemed to look as he sat there, surviving all alone, lost in the depths of his music and Eliot simply couldn't stand by and let his best friend feel abandoned in his own house. (For it _was_ Leo's house as much as it was his.)

With his hands noticeably shaking, Eliot's steps faltered. He wasn't sure why he was nervous, but it was undeniably obvious that he was. The leaf of paper held too tightly in his right hand trembled, vibrating with a crinkling sound until Eliot managed to awkwardly seat himself on the edge of the small piano bench beside Leo, thereby interrupting the latter's fluid thoughts. Leo turned to look at him with curiosity sparkling behind music-bright eyes.

"H-here," Eliot said, thrusting the manuscript in front of Leo's blinking face. Finding it difficult to focus on something so close to his nose, Leo pushed Eliot's hand away until he could decipher what was written on the page.

"A song," he said.

"_Obviously_." Devoid of courage, Eliot hid behind snark for a reply.

Leo laughed, slapping the handwritten piece on the stand. It took him a moment to decipher Eliot's hastily scrawled notes, but he soon began to sound the melody. Eliot leaned on his friend's shoulder, closing his eyes as he listened intently for mistakes - either in his manuscript or in Leo's playing - but the piece was written exactly as he had imagined, and it was played with more smoothness than even that. Mind drifting along with the notes, Eliot felt himself falling into a vague sense of surrealism, as if he had written this very song before, but somehow it had been _Leo_ crafting it on aged keys long before Eliot ever set it on paper.

The notes rolled liquidly off Leo's fingers, born of intimate familiarity left unexplained. But suddenly the song ceased, choking to a deadened halt right before the final measure. It...wasn't complete. Eliot's stomach sank.

"Why'd you stop?" he asked, trying his best not to make it sound like the whine it was.

Leo flipped the music over, hiding the notes from view, willing them to bury themselves deeply into the piano and far away from his eyes. "Play with me," he said.

"No."

"Play it."

"_No_."

Leo sighed and pushed Eliot off the bench. He landed with a crash and an "OW!", but Leo paid him no mind. Grumbling, Eliot dusted himself off, sat back on the bench, and elbowed Leo out of the way. "Stupid - " Eliot said, but obediently placed his hands above the keys, poised and held at the ready.

He hesitated.

Leo had almost tricked him into setting them down. He couldn't do it.

Leo shifted beside him, placing his hands in a position complimentary to Eliot's. "Play with me," he repeated, tapping his foot upon the hardwood floor to establish the tempo of the first measure. After three introductory beats and a cue, he began to play notes unwritten, providing a perfect countermelody within a spark of improvisation, supporting the main song - a melody still painfully absent. Eliot scowled for a moment, cursing Leo for doing this to him, but Eliot knew Leo was trying to help him overcome his demons. He would have to get over the loss of his mother sooner or later, and apparently Leo thought he had mourned in lonely silence for long enough.

Closing his eyes, Eliot too began to play.

...


	6. Chapter 6

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

...

The train screeched to a stop beside the station's newly remodeled platform, settling on groaning joints while passengers emerged from old-fashioned viscera, pulsing outwards in a heartbeat of luggage and chatter. The Duchess alighted with ease, grateful for the opportunity to rid herself of the cacophony of public transport. Breathing deeply, she straightened her hat, smoothed her dress, and was greeted by an entourage of faceless nobodies: men in freshly laundered suits who quietly carried her belongings to the comforts of a waiting limousine. Ignoring the servants, the Duchess Nightray made certain her maid hadn't flittered off and become lost in the station's bustling hubbub. (Jubjub was a highly intelligent creature, but he was fairly distractible whilst in possession of a human form. He greatly enjoyed experiencing the outside world in a body unnoticed by those agents of Pandora who wished ill upon every spawn of the Abyss not contracted to themselves; _disease-ridden mongrels, the lot of them_.) Satisfied the Chain-possessed maid remained acceptably close to the Duchess' elbow, the two companions headed off to join Yura's hired nobodies, speeding forth in the brisk morning light. She was hoping to reach the estate before breakfast.

It had been a long time since the Duchess Nightray last returned to this land settled so very far away from reality. A place smothered in its obsession with Pandora; a place deceived by the trivialities of itself. There was no enlightenment here; no desire for the better. People minded their own with no hopes of the future, and in their daily toil they created a future with no hope.

She sighed, suddenly morose. This world was bleak, bleak, bleak.

Gazing through tinted windows, she captured in her mind a brief glimpse of her old home, the ever-opulent Nightray Estate: a place of long-forgotten warmth and splish-splash teardrops of joy. She remembered countless days of watching her son, Eliot, as he chased his big brothers across a sprawling front yard. (The littlest of the three would inevitably trip over himself and end up falling to his knees. Where other five-year-olds may have cried, however, Eliot would resolutely pick himself up and continue his game, heart filled with a little less laughter, but certainly more determination. His brows would furrow and he would stumble forward until Ernest turned back, saw, and sighed. Ever-watchful Ernest would share a glance with Claude that spokeof _well, we can't outrun him today_, and the older boys would saunter over to pick Eliot up by his armpits. He would be hoisted atop Ernest's shoulders, and Claude would make some sort of joke about mutated, double-headed creatures. Eliot would laugh, his tiny face split into a grin as sparkling bright as sundrops skipping across the waters of the estate's crystal clear lagoon.)

Eliot always had the brightest smiles.

He also had the worst grass stains she had ever seen on a child's pant legs! But perhaps it was because he _wasn't_ perfect that he was such a brilliant son.

She remembered fondly the day he first decided to play the piano. Of course, this was before he had received any instruction whatsoever, but his eight-year-old eyes were set with the sort of stubbornness which meant he wouldn't take no for an answer: he _was _going to play with Mommy. So, she set him on her lap and placed his hands gently on the keys, ticking off "Hot Cross Buns" one note at a time. He had been satisfied, giggling happily when he recognized the tune...and that was the first time he had ever touched a piano. From then on, it was an impossible chore to get him _away_ from one.

He wrote his first composition at twelve, his first sonata at fifteen. Always for her. He would bow the violin accompaniment if it would persuade her to play longer, but really, what he loved most was to sit on the spare ottoman with face in palms and elbows on knees while she drew forth song after song, just for him. (It had always been her favorite way of getting her rowdy young man to settle down, mostly because it was the only method which actually _worked_.)

The Duchess smiled and the limo slowed, passing through wrought-iron gates before turning onto a private drive. Glancing at the chauffeur, the Duchess determined he knew where he was going without her needing to assist, and instead turned her attention to staring at the estate looming before her while she waved a silent goodbye to her most beloved son.

...

Eliot was single-mindedly determined to watch the after school debate _without_ interruption. Skipping his last class to make certain he saved the really good seats in the front of the auditorium (just out of the "beware-of-enthusiastic-speakers'-spit zone") he ensured no obnoxiously tall people could put their big heads in his way. Leo joined him later (having stayed through the entirety of his own classes; they were _finals_, after all), arriving with a smile and a lecture about the importance of attendance if Eliot really wanted to keep his valedictorian status. Eliot scoffed, waved it off as insignificant, and settled comfortably in his seat, eagerly awaiting the beginning of the debate while Leo rolled his eyes and unwrapped a candy bar. (At one point, after the arguments on the social and moral premises behind the first two books of the _Holy Knight _serieswere well underway, Leo turned back to survey the crowd. He smiled to himself as he silently confirmed his suspicions: this was _not_ the most popular of the school's end-of-year events; the audience was quite sparse indeed.)

Eliot left the auditorium an hour later, thoroughly disgusted.

"_Sloppy_," he said. "They messed up their research."

"Most of it wasfactual. You have to give them credit for that."

"But you heard how much they left out!"

Leo chuckled at the contradictory statement. "True. But remember: the teams only had one week to prepare."

"Doesn't matter. It was still sloppy."

Leo sighed and grabbed Eliot's arm, pulling him away from the line of waiting yellow busses, hoping to outrun the gloom cloud busily settling itself upon his friend's slumped shoulders. "You usually walk home, right?" Leo asked. "So let's walk."

"Yeah, but you take the bus."

"So what? Get Fred to drive me home if it rains. I know my way around."

Eliot smiled and let Leo take the lead. They were in no hurry: tomorrow's lazy awakening marked the first day of their long-awaited summer vacation. The two friends walked down the street arm-in-arm, Leo marching through the occasional puddle, Eliot trying to wrench his captured limb free in time to avoid the back splatters. (It didn't work, but Leo pouted on the rare occasion in which it did. So, Eliot sighed and settled for cringing in mock pain whenever Leo expressed his pleasure in a particularly enthusiastic stomp and managed to dot their faces with remnants of shattered muddy mirrors.)

"Why are you doing that?" Eliot finally asked, rubbing puddle-blood from his brow.

Leo grinned. "I consider it payback for having to wear the uniform all year long. I don't like wearing this much white."

"You get the cleaning bill."

"Sure."

Eliot stopped rubbing his face and stared at Leo's glasses, incredulous. "Really?" he asked, wondering if he had heard correctly.

"Sure."

"Wow," Eliot blinked. "That's...really nice of you, Leo."

"I know."

A sigh. "What _aren't_ you telling me?"

"That I've possibly filched your allowance for the past month and a half."

"You did not!"

"That's what you get for hiding money in the back of your favorite books! Couldn't have been easier!" Leo laughed. "I was wondering when you'd notice."

Eliot growled and made a lunge for Leo, causing the smaller boy to skip aside and bolt toward the Nightray Manor. With a hearty yell Eliot gave chase, tearing across the sidewalk at full speed despite the burden of carrying extra bags (Leo's - he was carrying Leo's). They raced the rest of the way home, dodging pedestrians and bicyclists, passing glassy puddles unbroken, soggy grass un-squished, and retreating limousines otherwise unseen.

...

The library doors burst open and a harried maid passed through, eyes desperately skittering this way and that, hands wringing twisted death to a fraying dust-cloth. The threshold's twin mahogany guardians boomed shut behind her, clashing and rebounding to a fitful rest, but still the maid turned and turned, running along corners and shelves, tables and chairs, rooms and hallways. Finally tripping herself up the stairs, she clip-clopped her way in too-big shoes around one last bend and found him.

"Gracious, Mr. Reim! You're a hard one to find!"

"Oh?" Reim said, concerned with the flush of the maid's cheeks, the disarray of her hair and uniform, her labored breathing, and the state of the strangled cloth held tautly between two white-knuckled fists. "What's the matter?" he inquired, gently steering her to a chair. He poured a glass of water from the pitcher standing sentry beside his master's office desk.

"A _guest!_" the maid puffed out, hands trembling with excitement as she traded dusting cloth for ice-glass, absently stuffing the rag in an apron pocket.

"The master is out today," Reim groaned. "He won't be back until it's much too late to receive guests..."

"No, no, no!" The maid said, meeting Reim's curious eyes. "The visitor isn't for Sir Barma. It's _you _I was looking for."

"Oh," Reim said. His mind blanked. Visitors didn't arrive for anyone but the master of the Estate; especially not when you lived in the Barma Manor. (Servants _always _met friends and family someplace where the ever-present illusions couldn't surreptitiously eavesdrop on their private conversations.) He stood slowly, brows furrowed, bemused. "I suppose I should attend to that, then."

"Yes, yes, with all due haste," the maid chittered, suspiciously glancing behind herself before lowering her voice to a scratchy whisper. "She's very beautiful, Mr. Reim. I can see why it is you've been keeping her a secret."

"Wh-what?" Reim spluttered. "I don't have a girlfriend!"

"Who is she, then?"

"I don't know!"

"Why is she calling? And why for you?"

"I don't know! I don't!" he said. "But I intend to find out." With an annoyed look at the open doorway, Reim stood and peevishly stalked through the hallways, aiming for the secondary parlor: a tasteful, if simply decorated room where the House's visitors were met if there was no engagement requiring use of one of the more ornate sitting rooms. _If this was another of Xerx's awful pranks..._

But it wasn't, and he knew it wasn't the minute he respectfully opened the parlor doors and his widening eyes met with the Lady's too-sweet smile.

...

Eliot had a difficult time catching up to Leo before they reached the grounds of the Nightray Estate. Leo, nimble today, swung himself around the corner of the house and darted through the gardens, passing summer roses and glimmering gardenias. He tore through the side entrance, keeping his corners tight to ensure he held onto his marginal lead for as long as possible. His steps were light and quick: he bounded through the kitchens; rushed past a perplexed Vincent in the bedroom hallway; nearly ran into a hastily scurrying Gilbert who, ironically, managed to place himself directly in Leo's intended path while trying to move out of the way _twice_; and breezed past Claude and Ernest as they stood in the doorways of their respective rooms, cheering, whistling, telling Leo to _go, go, go! Elly's not here yet!_

Eliot, however, had opted for bounding straight up the main steps. Wrenching the front door open, he flung his shoes in the vicinity of the corner where shoes should go and shrugged the bags off as quickly as he could. Spinning around, he made sure the twin bags and sword case landed at least partially out of the way before he took off running through the halls in his socks. Rushing past a safely-cloistered-but-still-peeking Vincent; a frazzled, plastered-to-the-side-of-the-wall Gilbert; a taunting couple of older brothers telling him he _wasn't going to make it, he wasn't going to make it~!_; he nearly tripped over himself trying to avoid Vanessa, who had exited her room to see what the commotion was all about. As he was stumbling, Eliot caught a glimpse of a black-topped-white-blur at the farthest end of the corridor, _almost to the threshold of his room already!_ With a hearty yell, he moved Vanessa aside and barreled after Leo.

It was close.

Leo just barely managed to evade Eliot's wild swipes, and one boy sprawled through the hallway while the other tumbled headlong into the room. Laughing, wheezing, giggling, and cursing, the boys righted themselves to cheers heralded by the other four boys and a mostly ignorable lecture from Vanessa. Fred, after noticing the thundering storm had finally passed, appeared at the other end of the hall with a snack tray in each hand. He led the rest of the siblings into his own room, the only one spacious enough (_clean_ enough) to accommodate them all as they feasted on celery stalks and peanut butter, decorated heavily with a layer of plump, juicy raisins. Once the eight had eaten their fill, Fred unveiled a hidden tier of brownies as a special start-of-summer treat. Amid groans of protest, the siblings proceeded to fill their bellies again.

(Later that afternoon, as he put the dishes away, Fred would shake his head with a smile. The brownies would be gone, but there would still be plenty of celery left to make a midmorning treat for the morrow.)

With snack time over, Eliot and Leo trudged back to their shared room, pilfering the closets for cooler, cleaner outfits. Leo kept his spare clothes stuffed in an unused drawer somewhere (Eliot's things were much too big for the smaller boy to borrow when he came over) and he happily 'ahh'ed his appreciation when he discovered where exactly that missing green shirt of his had gone; he'd torn the orphanage apart looking for it.

"So, what now?" Leo asked Eliot after they had changed, retrieved their forgotten book bags from the entryway, straightened their shoes, closed the swinging doors, and flopped side-by-side on the bed, staring up at the lazily twirling ceiling fan.

"I dunno," Eliot replied with a yawn.

"That's helpful."

"You asking but not thinking doesn't help much, either, wise guy."

"Wanna make something of it?" Leo challenged, light reflecting off his glasses while he mirrored the gleam with a smirk.

Eliot glowered at him. "Yeah. I do."

"First player, mine."

"Whatever."

The boys leaped from the bed, raced to the living room, and proceeded to battle the afternoon away with the newest video games they'd both been dying to try out.

(Ironically, Leo won those, too.)

...

The limousine was traded for a more inconspicuous vehicle: a typical white service van of the type that could be seen pulling up to the garage or kitchens on any given day. It wasn't difficult to sneak past security; the driver and his main transport _were_ both legitimate, after all, and the lone woman hidden in the back didn't feel cramped, despite sitting amid blocks of towering cargo. (At least the boxes containing piles of fresh linens didn't smell badly; she could think of a million scenarios where sneaking into the estate would make for a most horrific experience. Compared to the abhorrences scrutinized in her wandering imagination, this ride was quite pleasant.)

Once the driver reached the servant's entrance - a small, inconspicuous door located near the kitchens - Jubjub, in the guise of a pretty-pretty maid, slipped out and mingled with several other servants. Carrying an unloaded box of linens, she eventually passed into the manor undetected.

The Duchess smiled, watching from afar with a pair of pocket-sized binoculars. The infiltration was a success, then, and all she had to do was wait for Jubjub to finish his job. (Well, nothing to worry about there: they'd danced these steps many a times; their shared days of stumbling and toe-stepping were long swept into the ever-sashaying past.) With a wave of the Duchess' hand, her chauffeur eased the black limousine into the flow of traffic, drifting away from the private road which led to the front of the mansion. The Duchess relaxed in her seat, thinking eagerly of the hot bath awaiting her at the hotel.

...

Reim's eyes widened. "M-Miss Sharon," he stammered. "What brings you here?"

"You, silly!" The girl giggled, smiling when she saw the flabbergasted look on her old playmate's face; it wasn't often when a Reinsworth heiress entered the Barma household. (It was a frequently pontificated rule in their own House that the women would not do so _at all_, simply on principle - well, ever since Grandma Cheryl turned down Mr. Rufus' marriage proposal, anyway.)

Sharon lightly patted an adjacent cushion on the sofa before continuing. "And also because You-Know-Who asked me to."

Reim sighed. He took the offered seat, careful to not encroach upon the Lady's personal space, and began cleaning his glasses with a lightly embroidered handkerchief. "I don't know anything," he said.

She smiled. "That's why I'm here."

"Why?" he grumped, placing the glasses on the bridge of his nose with a huff.

"Xerxes wanted to _give_ you information."

Sliding down the couch with both hands shoved deeply within his pockets, Reim looked at Sharon skeptically from the corner of his eye.

"No, really," Sharon laughed. "He figured there wasn't any harm in it. It's not like this is something you can run out and get yourself nearly decapitated over."

"Wonderful," Reim replied flatly.

"Well, you know how he is. Paranoid after the episode with Bandersnatch. He had to make certain the Baskervilles were staying out of this one before he let you in."

"I see he had no such reservations about _your_ involvement, Miss Sharon."

"Of course he did! _I _don't know anything more than you do, and therefore cannot get myself stuck in the way of danger."

"I see."

"So, here's what he sent." Sharon said, gesturing to a packet lying innocently upon the coffee table before her. "It's not much, I'm afraid."

"That isn't a good thing."

"Why?"

Reim sighed heavily. "Because it means he wants _me_ to do the research."

Sharon looked at Reim's frustrated face and laughed. Reim couldn't help but notice how _familiar_ the gesture was, as if Xerxes had managed to find a way to mock him from afar, using Sharon as a shamanic medium to link their two separate worlds.

He closed his eyes. He needed coffee.

...

Duke Barma gently fanned himself while he watched Lady Cheryl chat amicably with various Pandora agents, confirming what he had already known for _months_. Pandora was a bit slow on these things, but that was to be expected; they tended to wrap themselves in too much bureaucratic red tape to be of any use in the deceptively delicate, silken-tongued web of information gathering spun by Houses such as his. That was why he continued to place only the barest of handfuls of spies within the agency, with Reim _not_ being one of those chosen for the task (much too close to Xerxes Break, that one; Rufus Barma wouldn't trust Reim with _any_ sort of details which might cause him to choose between his loyalties: sworn service to his master wouldn't keep Reim from aiding that outrageous clown on any given day).

The Duke sighed and snapped his fan shut, stowing it within the folds of his robe after the Lady appeared to be finished speaking. He gently pushed her wheelchair through the remainder of the too-white halls, repeating their little routine: push, stop, chat, push again. The chit-chat was random at best, not telling him much of _anything_ he didn't already know, and he suspected that was precisely _why _the Lady wasted her time with these unworthy subordinates. (Either that or she was purposefully searching for something he _didn't_ know; but the idea was almost as preposterous as it was likely, so it was dismissed.)

"What are you doing, Lady Cheryl?" he finally asked, delighted to be free of the confines of Pandora's headquarters.

"Why, building rapport with the field agents!" she answered, her falsely astonished tone suggesting he should have known all along.

_He_ _had_. "I was endeavoring to ask of you the reasons _why_."

"Because field agents know many things."

"Things my agents have already discovered."

"True, true."

He sighed. She shifted in her wheelchair, drawing her lavender-light shawl around her shoulders, more out of habit than discomfort. "But your dim-witted agents don't know a thing about my granddaughter's knight, and I have to ensure it stays that way."

He looked at her askance. "I know full well what that man is up to."

"But do you know _why_?" she asked, eyes narrowing as her face slid into a sly smile.

"Do _you_?" he countered. "Pandora knows even less."

"That's precisely what I was confirming. The more lies _I_ spread, the better _his_ tracks are covered."

"Xerxes Break can cover his own tracks."

"I happen to like the boy. Butt out, Ruf."

His eyes narrowed, but he chose not to speak.

"Besides," she continued. "They'd only get in his way if they investigated as well. I'd much prefer this situation fall under the protection of our two Houses _only_. We don't need Pandora's interference, much less that of the other Dukedoms."

He scoffed. "They wouldn't even know where to begin."

"Well, we _are_ the ones withholding that sort of information."

"It's true, though," Barma said, eyes contemplative, fan tapping his chin lightly as he switched topics. "The boy _is _connected; I confirmed it myself yestereve."

"Is this Enigma who I think he is?"

"You have a guess as to his identity?"

"As a matter of fact, I do."

"Do tell; you know how I hate waiting."

...

Reim grumbled as he carried Xerxes' newest project through the evening-quiet halls. Catching sight of a clearly confused maid, Reim irately gestured to the set of doors which would lead her down the hallway to the room designated for linen delivery drop offs - they'd only been doing so _all day_, how did this girl manage to get herself lost? - and made his way toward the upstairs library in a bit of a temper. In order to find the documents requested, he'd need access to Barma's most secret journals. He'd best begin while the master was out; it'd make for a most troublesome situation if he were caught sneaking where he didn't belong. (Xerxes Break meant a lot to Reim, and he would do whatever he could to help, but he wasn't sure he would risk his life for the sake of his stupid friend's stupid _project_.) There was stuff in this library the other Houses would kill to acquire a _list_ of, never mind the actual contents themselves...

With a sigh, Reim continued up the flight of stairs leading to the fourth story and entered an inconspicuous, undecorated, and otherwise unused study, painstakingly identical to the nine others situated on this forgotten floor to keep it company. Closing the door tightly behind himself (always waiting for the _click _of the lock before continuing), he opened the stairway concealed behind an unattractive desk, took a deep breath, and gently proceeded forward. He brushed aside several creeping cobwebs, trying not to think of them as salivating strings; tried to ignore the bone-white walls and liver-colored carpet which looked so much like dried blood beneath his trespassing feet; willed his wobbly knees to not betray him now, he'd never survive if he injured himself in a fall and someone found out about this place because of it.

The sweat on his face slid the weight of his glasses down his nose. Impatiently pushing them up, he heaved open the door at the top of the short stairwell and groped blindly for the pulley designed to close the door at the bottom. Reim held his breath as he listened for the _click _proclaiming the door securely locked. (He almost missed it, his thrashing heart cried so loudly.)

Reim tiptoed into the library with a glance at the ceiling to confirm no illusions were hanging overhead, lying in wait in darkened corners, spying on him with wicked eyes and grisly grins. His careful visual sweeps revealed nothing, and he refused to pause long enough to consider _why not? of all places there should be some here_, instead choosing to be extraordinarily grateful for their absence. He willed his trembling hands to pull forbidden file after file from resting places atop dusty shelves so he could get the hell out of this dingy, cobwebby room as quickly as his feet could make him move.

He cursed Xerxes Break for making him do this; cursed himself for his own foolish allegiance to that insane man. It was going to get him killed, it really was, because he _knew_ his master was watching, _knew _there were illusions everywhere, _knew _there was nothing he could do to pass beneath Rufus Barma's notice, and Barma wasn't Bandersnatch; there would be no false death to save him.

He _knew_ it.

So why did his hands continue to leaf through page after page while his fevered eyes skimmed across impossibly tiny scrawl spilled from the pens of people so cursed in death they would never leave the perdition of Abyss? Why did his arms furiously reach to pull more and more of these thrice-damned papers from shelves groaning muted warnings to him in their shadow-darkened, mumbling cries, expressing agony petrified by years of solitude and slavery? _Why_ did he do this when he knew it would be his death?

It would be his death. It really, really would.

It would.

Reim heard a sound: a creaking laugh, sharp and high. Whipping his head around, he squinted, trying his best to discern his surroundings in the deep, musty gloom. The lights were pitifully dim and bare, swaying from thin wires in a room with no breeze, moving shadows in a constant, macabre tango. They were not hung like lines of strangled men to accommodate reading Dukes (nor to accommodate snooping and prying and deceiving servants of said Dukes); only placed there for swift and certain locating. (Because, after all, the Duke who knew of this room already knew _every book in this room_; whyever would he require a light to locate what he wanted when he already knew the resting place in which it lay?)

Sweat ran down Reim's forehead, condensing heavily on his brow. A trickle found his eye; he wiped it away hastily. He saw something move. He turned. He couldn't find it.

_Oh, shit,_ Reim thought. _Shit._

The shadows skipped around his feet. He was sweating so badly he could smell the pungent odor wafting from his jacket. But it was too late now. There would be no escape. He was caught, he was dead, he was never going to get out of this alive, and there was no way Rufus Barma would ever let him live after deliberately crossing into territory so taboo it wasn't even funny. And he knew it, too.

The shadows moved again, and his eyes whipped around, trying desperately to focus - but everything was so _damn gloomy!_ His heart raced, his eyes blinked, his glasses slipped, and his sweaty hands slipped from the edge of the table he was gripping too hard. He stumbled to the floor. He cringed and leapt back to his feet, standing fully just as an illusory form winged a deadly arc from the safety of the shadows above and bore down on his unprotected head, dark screams frighteningly mad in their zeal for his traitorous blood.

...


	7. Chapter 7

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

...

Isla Yura was a curious man by nature. Like his equally curious kinsman, His Lordship, the Ever Esteemed Sir Royal Duke Rufus Barma (or whatever other pompous name the man went by these days), Isla Yura was a man who loved to seek knowledge for knowledge's sake. However, despite the shared interest in all things mysterious and intriguing, the two didn't get along very well, oh no.

You see, while Barma sought information because he desired to know all things, Yura would do so only to a point: the point in which he discovered the items he sought could, in fact, become liquidated. All things could be sold, if you knew how to do the selling, and this little practice bothered Barma greatly. (Yura didn't let the bothering bother _him_, so they got along well enough when neither had anything to do with the other.)

In truth, Isla Yura had no real idea of what mysteries were afoot. He only knew Rufus Barma was involved, and that, by nature, meant it was something interesting; he therefore _had_ to know more. The fact Xerxes Break was _also _interested meant it probably related to the Tragedy of Sabrie. And Sabrie was something Yura could completely understand.

There was much profit in it.

Of course, if Yura was ignorant of the finer details of the project, it meant the Duchess Nightray was even more so. (This was an _extraordinarily_ fortuitous happenstance, providing him with an unprecedented upper hand in their everlasting back-and-forth power struggles. He had no doubt the woman would try to conceal her learnings, using her Chain's knowledge as leverage against him, but that was why those beautiful lace gloves she adored so very much were bugged at both wrists and she didn't know a damn thing about it.) Unfortunately, the only way he could see this plan of his working was _with_ her cooperation. Jubjub was able to infiltrate places his network of subordinates could not, stealing away the very bodies of servants from _within_ the untouchable innards of a thriving, thrumming household.

_He_ could only place outside servants in, hoping their pathogenetic influences were stealthy enough to bypass certain defenses. Upon the rarest of occasions, he could even hope to bribe, coerce, or persuade a current employee to literally spill the guts of his master's house...but that wouldn't work here.

_She_, on the other hand, could simply will a latent parasite into action, controlling the mind and body of an already trusted employee for a specified amount of time. The Duchess could rot a House from the inside out, smearing poisonous vapors of deception in her wake. It was quick, efficient work, and Yura was all for efficiency; with it in hand he could prance through fields of lily-like duplicity without a footstep's mark to trace. (Such was the beauty of manipulation, and the very reason he bothered to put up with her nuisances.) Yes, the flowers of subtlety did smell quite sweet.

But, that aside, efficiency meant scoping information from the source. This was going to be interesting, indeed.

...

Biting, shrieking death forced itself from tangled birth-shadows, smoldering murder set deep behind beady eyes. It slung itself at him; he had no time to duck. He didn't even have time to scream.

Its tangling claws ripped at the roots of his short hair (he could feel it leaving his scalp in clumps, burning, burning, _burning_); furious teeth gnawed at his face, searching for unprotected eyes. His glasses were ripped from the bridge of his nose; his ears shredded to leave marks too deep to heal as twin earrings bounced noisily across the blood-stained floor beneath frantic, panicked feet. Too-white bones exposed their ruined selves as a rain of blood calved from a face of frozen, fleshy strips, leaving him nothing more than a bone-tipped glacier of dripping gore and screaming, insufferable _agony_.

He fell upon himself and cowered beneath the flimsy protection offered by mutilated limbs, trying to shield what was left of his face, what was left of his life. He tried to escape the punishment by screaming and pleading, groveling and weeping, hiding his body beneath the table, smearing a great trail of severed blood and flowing gristle across the floor. The bright-bright blood bubbled in fear, but fear of death lived and breathed no more within his frozen soul. For death was welcome, coveted, and precious: far better than the torment of enduring so grotesque an illusion! So sweetly merciful in comparison to _this_! In comparison to the overwhelming wrath and fury of his master's House for his most despicable treachery; it was unforgivable,what he had done.

His white-white eyes were empty and so were his lungs. Terrified screams and cries for clemency suffocated and expired in his heart-stopped veins. The pin-drop silence retched, overwhelming his ears with a bitter disgorgement of misery: thick, bottomless, black. He was struck both deaf and dumb.

For all his imploring there was no response. No command, no withdrawal, _nothing_.

He had no choice but to bear his wretched fate, to face these intolerable consequences. He could only hope this truly _was _an illusion bearing down upon him, stealing his breath as he trembled and waited for the abuse to begin, this time in earnest...

But not a single death-bladed finger touched him.

Reim's face remained whole; his fright-stiffened arms unscathed. His glasses perched innocently upon his nose, perhaps knocked askew during his moment of mind-numbing panic. And that wasn't blood pouring down his brow onto the floor in great smattering drops, trickling into watering, white-rimmed eyes, but rather a deluge of his own sweat. The horrible, raucous noise was still there, less loud, echoing through his imagination-bruised skull. But once the initial fear and daydreamed nightmare fled his body, Reim's wild eyes could see he wasn't being attacked by an illusion.

No, not at all.

He wasn't even being _attacked_.

...

Reim's legs just barely supported his body over the threshold of his room, the only place in this execrable mansion he could truly deem _safe_. Upon slamming the door (his eternal friend, steadfastly separating him from such outside derangement), he slid to the floor in a gelatinous heap. Mournfully staring up, wishing he could hex the lock above his head, he forced himself to move his arm and quiver the deadbolt into place. He threw stolen files somewhere _away,_ drawing fear-bitter breaths in light, quick succession. His nerves were frayed to breaking. (Something was genuinely amiss in this house, and he wasn't sure what. Didn't want to _think about _what. He didn't want to know.

_He didn't want to know._)

A few moments of violent trembling later, he forced slow, deep breaths into terror-tight lungs, seeking to un-seize himself from himself. He managed to calm down enough to at least _consider_ regaining his mind before he lost it to his own foolishness. Pushing his glasses higher with renewed (if still battered) determination, Reim crawled along the floor and gathered his scattered wits as much as he gathered scattered papers before sitting heavily in a swivel chair beside his desk. Work was something he could handle; something he could hold on to. It was the only thing solid he _had_ at the moment.

Spreading his collection of forbidden treasures across an immaculate wooden surface revealed a great, glimmering portion to be nearly illegible; these documents humbly presented delicate, upturned faces smeared with age-faded scrawl, resembling dim memories of children left playing in the faded light of muddy afternoons. The rest of the pile was, quite simply, indecipherable. Bold proclamations and opinionated statements unashamedly bared themselves beneath bright lamplight, yet remained inscrutably hidden within the darkest shadows time had to offer.

Reim sighed, rubbed his face, and settled in for what promised to be a _very _long night.

...

Xerxes Break hummed a light, tuneless ditty to himself while he gently set aside his ever-present companion. With a flick of a wrist he snatched a bright red brush; with his other he kicked back his sleeves. He continued his unmelodious melody while brushing dear Emily's hair, careful to make certain the strokes were long and smooth, ever mindful of accidentally ripping silky strands from her tiny little head. Emily sat straight and still in silence, enjoying every bit of the attention. (And, as they were alone, she had no reason to say anything at all; voices only needed voicing when there was someone to mislead.)

In the meantime, she let Xerxes finish his grooming ritual because she knew it was relaxing for him to do repetitive things while his mind was a-whirring, beating half-cracked ideas until firm, ready to be poured into action and baked to perfection once the places were set and marked for his use. (His ideas only grew larger and more delicious when subjected to the heat of battle, after all, and more thoroughly appreciated once every ingredient was properly consumed by manipulative, sugar-sweet fingers.)

The brushing done, he flipped out a clean pink dress and laid it beside her, patting her head and pausing his song just long enough to mutter something about returning in a moment. She didn't listen (he didn't expect her to), and waited for him to flutter distractedly through the closet before donning her new outfit: one absolutely identical to three others he tucked away somewhere. (She bet it was the sock drawer, but she had never been able to discover if that truly _was_ the place they were hid; she had not the strength to check for herself.) Carefully retying loose bows, Emily hopped off the dressing table and landed on a pillow a short distance away, cuddling into the soft blankets of her personal bed while Xerxes went about whatever he went-abouted. He'd be back soon enough.

Xerxes, meanwhile, appeared in the kitchens, choosing to tiptoe through the pantry because it would do no good to pop out of the ovens - there would be no cook or serving boy to frighten this late into the evening. Searching around in the dark hindered his movements not one bit, given that he was already quite blind, and it was because of this condition that Reim-san was ever so generous to leave his cupcakes in _exactly_ the same spot every week. (Even if they were relocated, by perhaps a mischievous Miss Sharon or Lady Cheryl, Break would have had no trouble; the sugary treats smelled far too delightful for him to miss.)

Popping open an old Tupperware container, Xerxes selected his two favorites of the colorful desserts and pushed the rest away. (It was a little known secret Reim was the eldest son of a talented, small-town baker. Reim had inherited his mother's love of the craft, and while it was true he made the best cakes, his lemon-raspberry concoctions were never quite as good as _hers_. It made all the sense in the world for _that _particular flavor to be the one Xerxes enjoyed the most: the only one Reim _couldn't get right_ for the life of him.) Toying with the miniature delights for a moment, Break's thoughts wandered to his bespectacled friend. The task he had been assigned was certain to be dangerous; Barma would not likely miss the particular web of tricky things Reim was getting himself into, and it was probable there would be retribution (or at least a confrontation) for this act of blatant defiance.

However...Barma was surely able to deduce which documents Reim would be getting into and which he would leave and let be. If the man had that many qualms about his servants uncovering sensitive information, then anything of value would surely have been relocated by now. (Wasn't that the point in knowing everything?_) _So it was Barma's own fault, really, Reim was up there getting into trouble.

Tossing his thoughts aside, Xerxes grinned bright and loud. He settled on devouring the orange cupcake to his left first, and bit through it with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, relishing the feel of creamy-smooth icing as it slid over his teeth. (In that dark little morbid part of him, he imagined he was none too different from those ravenous carnivores who sank bright-white teeth into the helpless bodies of paralyzed prey; the sensation was made even more real when he hit the jelly hidden deep in the center.)

Things were about to become interesting in this multiplayer game of theirs. What with Enigma being so enigmatic (not that he was all that important right now; Break had bigger fish to fry); Eliot being so clueless (typical of a Nightray, trust him, he knew); the Barma House watching (as always) while (more than likely) being watched by the Reinsworths; and, of, course, himself out in the thick of things with nobody understanding what he was up to or why. It was all so _perfect_.

Too bad Reim had to suffer a little because of it.

His cupcakes really were quite good.

...

Sitting back in a groaning, bemoaning chair, Reim tossed himself another swallow of room-cold coffee, glowering at the myriad of sounds lying surreptitiously beyond curtain-covered windows. The noises had startled him from his safe haven of work, completely shattering his void of quiet concentration. He removed his glasses and cleaned them, habitually squeaking the lenses. He was jumpy tonight. Of course, after suffering the train wreck his imagination had broadsided him with in the library, it was logically understandable for him to be particularly sensitive to the normal sounds of the night outside. He only wished his anxiety would hurry up and dissipate; he'd like to resume his assignment without fearing he had exploded his own heart.

He was still shaken and that left him peevish. Because it was stupid and illogical, and all his very own fault, though he'd much rather blame the whole ordeal on Xerxes because it was by Xerxes' insistence that he went where he shouldn't and suffered what he suffered and he was still so mad he didn't know what else to do about it. So he put his glasses on his face and bent over his notes, trying to erase the memory of still-fresh events before they piled on him _again _and buried him in an even more shamefaced grave.

He _really_ didn't want to think about it.

But apparently, back within the oppressive embrace of his _most favorite_ of hidden-forbidden enclaves, he had had the intense misfortune of interrupting the nightly hunting patterns _of a bat_.

It wasn't even an illusion.

But it scared him just as bad.

...

The bat fluttered against the ceiling, swooping and zipping, shrieking and calling. A second joined the first, then three, then four...a whole stream shot through the dingy air above Reim's arm-and-table protected head, hissing forth like black steam spat through a gap between rafters. They rushed an agitated river to the other end of the room, melting through a hole in the ceiling just small enough to permit instantaneous escape. Reim hazily acknowledged the possibility of them flying near the attic, and the presence of bats meant there was a hole somewhere needing to be fixed...

Oh, and they had bats living in the loft.

He crawled out of his makeshift refuge, but his legs turned to jelly and he sank wearily beside a musty, rotting step stool. Heart racing, head reeling, he was left feeling incredibly stupid for falling victim to a self-induced panic attack. He chuckled tentatively into the stale, oppressive air, ignoring the last swooping stragglers as they trickled out, preparing to catch their evening meal. He felt so _stupid!_ Xerxes would never let him live it down if he found out Reim had nearly killed himself over a couple of _bats. _Sobered by the thought, Reim resolved to never let Break know of this incident. Never.

Ever.

Never ever, ever never.

Never ever, ever never, never ever _ever_.

With great effort, Reim stood on trembling legs and forced his quivering limbs to organize scattered disarray. Replacing every page, journal, what-have-you _exactly_ where it belonged, he grabbed the pathetic shards of his remaining sanity and held their papery wings close to his chest, resolving to get the hell out of there and finish his research _somewhere else_. This wasn't worth risking cardiac arrest and the only thing he cared about now was escape.

Turning off the lights, Reim descended the passageway leading back to that blessedly ordinary looking study, passed an equally ordinary desk, and made his way back to his room through ordinary night-darkened halls. He kept his eyes forward, kept one foot in front of the other, and never once looked back. Never once glimpsed the image which smiled bitterly from the shadows of the library's farthest end before the final door shut, shimmering out of existence with the snap of a fan held thirty miles distant.

...

Gilbert yawned, golden eyes fluttering shut as he stretched and cuddled beneath his blankets. The green-eyed teddy bear he hadn't yet outgrown - yet _had _managed to hide from Vincent - lay loyally by his side, keeping him safe as he fell into the swish-swishing tides of his dreams, floating this way and that within the imaginative recesses of a child's slumber. The dull plastic eyes of his teddy (named, of all things, _Jack_, although no one was quite sure _why_. It was an odd choice in its simplicity, ill befitting a proper Nightray's normal sense of highbred nomenclature) remained wide awake and vigilant, ever wary of the heterochromatic inspection of the bed in which Gilbert lay. With a look of lingering regret, the door to the room closed fully, shutting out the abnormal gaze which would forever cause even stuffed toys to tremble, cursed as it was.

Vincent's feet padded ever so gently from his older brother's room, clad in soft slippers of white. (Gil's were black, so it was like they had a matching pair - just not. Like Vincent's eyes: they made a matching pair, but didn't. He didn't understand why. Nobody understood why. It just happened and that's how it was, like it or not, and _nobody _liked it save Gilbert, but even then sometimes Vincent knew he was lying.)

With a sigh Vincent kicked his slippers off and stuffed them under his bed, but not too far back because he wanted to find them again in the morning when the kitchen tiles were frightfully cold on sleep-warm feet, and that wasn't a pleasant feeling to wake up to. So, slippers positioned acceptably close, if not quite together in a side-by-side set like Eliot would have insisted upon had he been there to rearrange them himself, Vincent crawled atop his covers and lethargically flopped over a pillow. His own stuffed companion - a pale rabbit with an equally pale ribbon of green tied around its fluffy-fluffy throat - stared into endless midnight, having lost its beady black eyes long ago. (They were too judgmental of him, too scornful. Like everybody else. And, like everybody else, those damned eyes of its _matched._)

Vincent hadn't wanted to be different, but he was. And so he _was_, and he never could be normal like his beloved brother; that was the truth, as much as he despised it. Like life despised _him_.

With a frustrated sigh Vincent turned to face the wall, hugging the rabbit close to his chest; its mutilated face pointed in the same direction he gazed, peering through impenetrable shadows, always finding nothing. There would be nothing until the hours after midnight when the darkness refused to be judgmental. (Vincent liked the night. He liked the flowers that blossomed beneath star-filled skies, and he liked to watch them sway in the breeze.) Even the harsh-seeming rays of the moon were gentle, tender, and soft upon whomsoever walked beneath those silvery breaths, cursed child or no. He never shared this with Gil, though, as Gil liked to sleep, and Vincent couldn't find the courage to wake his brother when really, it might make Gil angry. And while that was okay, for something as precious to him as this...

Vincent would rather keep it a secret.

Once he was sure the household had joined his brother in their game of synchronized snoring, Vincent groped around for his slippers and stole outside, standing in the gentle breeze with his rabbit tucked under one arm while the other parted some bush or another so he could navigate through the less frequented paths and find his secret place. (It wasn't exactly hidden, the stone bench sitting beside the inner-garden terrace, but it wasn't oft visited either, so he liked to come here and be alone. And it was admittedly cooler to _not_ enter one's secret place by means of an unconcealed _path_.) Hopping onto the bench, Vincent swung his little legs and watched as a bird fluttered from nothing to nothing, shadowing so briefly it might just have been his imagination, had he not heard the rush of wingbeats to accompany the movement.

All else was quiet, held comfortably secure in the arms of a world where color dimmed and noise muted. Where each was the same: every breathing soul painted silver beneath the wide brush of a waxing moon. None were scrutinized, each accepted as integral parts of one serene, heavily shadowed canvas.

The _crunch-crunching _of a pebbled path startled him, but he didn't turn around. He continued swinging his slippered feet, unconcerned. If it was one of his siblings...well, it wouldn't be. They were all fast asleep. Which only left one other person, and Vincent had been meaning to ask him something, anyway.

"What are you doing out here so late?" The soft voice was careful to avoid ruining the stillness of the garden's moonlit sanctuary.

"Same as you," Vincent replied.

Cautiously, Leo finished the walk to the terrace, mindful of his own dark slippers on the shadow-veiled steps. He sat next to Vincent, choosing to ignore the empty space available on the other end. This was what finally captured Vincent's attention; his mix-matched eyes narrowed, suspicious gaze fully zeroed on Leo as twin lenses beheld stars and ignored the tightening of the child's arm around a stuffed rabbit's soft midsection.

"The stars are twinkling. I like to look at them when the nights are this clear."

"I don't," Vincent replied. Simply. Suspiciously.

Leo smiled. "Because they look like they're laughing at you?" He didn't need to glance at Vincent's face to know his conjecture was correct; he himself had felt the same for so many years of that miserable life he had once called a childhood.

"What do you want?" Vincent asked, changing the subject.

"You asked me something the other day. About being hated."

"You are."

"You are, too," Leo gently reminded.

"I know." A bitter laugh. Too bitter for a child so young. Too _knowing_. "But why do they hate _you?_"

Leo gazed at the roses, leaves softly shirring, starlight tickling the petals. Heavy heads drooped downward, bestowing goodnight kisses to the earth which nurtured them. "Same as you, I guess," he replied.

"Because you're different?"

"Because I'm cursed."

"But you're not a Child of Hell."

"No...but I'm from there." He didn't say anything more, didn't need to. One good look from Vincent's narrowed eyes was enough, and Leo knew the boy understood. The kid was sharp; unappreciated talent like that was dangerous, especially when it was unloved. He knew it firsthand.

Leo smiled and slipped off the bench, heading back to bed. He didn't look back to see if Vincent would follow. (He didn't need to.)

...

Morning greeted Reim too early, too fast. His eyes pried apart with more effort than he was willing to expend, his body lead-heavy and sleep-laden. His arms had gone completely numb, circulation having ceased after lying awkwardly atop a wooden desk for the past several hours. His cheek itched, mashed against the staggered edges of a plump manilla folder, and his temples felt an awkward sort of pressure from wearing torqued glasses as a result of his face meeting said impromptu pillow. His head pounded. He hadn't been asleep nearly long enough to want to face this day (the master was surely awake by now; Reim was late, things were not looking any better; he was still quite doomed) so he thought about ignoring it all and closing his eyes. But then he remembered the part about his master surely being awake by now, and that meant he was surely _back by now_, and that, in turn, meant Duke Barma was _back in the mansion_ and Reim wasn't there with the morning coffee and a scoop of sugar and a splash of creamer and this was not a good day, not a very good day at all.

"You're dead."

"AARGH!" Reim screamed, toppling from his chair, landing on the floor in a sleep-tangled heap of too-early irritability. "Xerxes Break, get _out _of my window!"

With an over-dramatized eye-roll (he only had one, he had to make it count), Break finished climbing into the second-story bedroom. He landed on white-booted feet with the grace of a cat, turning his body just far enough to shut the glass pane behind himself. Reim wouldn't ask how Break managed any of it; he knew he wouldn't get an answer. Instead, he settled for being grumpy; goodness knew Break deserved to hear about it.

"Shh," Break smiled, stopping Reim before he launched head first into a hearty lecture of do-you-know-what-I-had-to-endure-because-of-yous and I-can't-believe-you-made-me-do-thats.

A pleasant glower for a response. _"Why?"_

"Because I already know what you're going to say."

"No, you have absolutely _no_ idea whatsoever."

Xerxes laughed and pointed a finger to the floor. For a moment Reim stared blankly, but as soon as it registered Xerxes was being _helpful_, he looked down. And for the first time Reim noticed the abnormal shape of the shadow surrounding his still seated self, rippling softly at the edges to make absolutely certain he noticed. "Eques," he sighed. (Well, this was certainly mortifying. He didn't know whether he wanted to stammer out a thank you to Xerxes for being so _uncharacteristically_ _thoughtful_ or attempt to strangle the man for the added humiliation. He decided to stay where he was and let his face steam red-hot because, in the end, he could do neither of those things.)

"Milady was kind enough to leave him with you after her visit."

Reim ran a hand across his face, groaning. It all _figured_.

"Oh, don't be like that!" Xerxes laughed, tossing Emily at him. Reim jumped and deflected the freakish thing to the floor, staring at it in horror when it made a sound suspiciously like an _ouch_. But that was silly; it was a doll; dolls certainly _weren't_ sentient beings.

Xerxes' _tsk-tsk_ was soft, but he let Emily lie where she was, facedown and quite limp. "Do you feel better, Reim-san?" he asked, a look of concern lightly dusted across his face, a mischievous twinkle hidden in the depths of his pomegranate-red eye.

Reim glowered.

"Oh my, nasty as usual. You really _do_ need a pot of coffee to become civilized."

"What do you want?"

"Mainly to see what you've discovered."

"How do you know I found anything?" Reim growled, feeling rather uncooperative as a result of his embarrassment.

"Why, Emily told me so~!" Xerxes laughed, poking the doll which had somehow reappeared on his shoulder without either of them having picked her up. (Again, Reim chose to save himself the headache by ignoring the anomaly and pretending it never happened.) Seeing Reim's unhappy face, however, Xerxes sat upon the edge of his friend's yesterday-made-and-not-disturbed-since bed, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture. "I know you better than _that_, Reim-san. You could at least give me a little credit. You neverfall asleep on your work unless it's finished."

Well, Break had him there. Reim wouldn't ask how Xerxes knew he had been sleeping on those files, though, since he didn't particularly care to know the answer. Nor did he want to understand how Break managed to open the heavy curtains covering a _locked _window while remaining _outside _of it _on the second story_. (The man was too bizarre to deal with this early in the morning.)

Reim picked himself off the floor and shuffled toward the desk, but Break's gentle hands fell across his shoulders and he found himself steered toward the bed: the bed which now had its covers turned down and looked so delightfully inviting. "Sleep now," Break said, and Reim automatically crawled in, too exhausted to argue; he knew Xerxes would win regardless. (The next thing he saw was the inside of his happily closed eyelids.)

Break smiled, careful to shut the door quietly behind him when he exited. It didn't matter how big Reim and Sharon had grown; to him they were still the same innocent, wide-eyed children he had met all those many years ago. Full of angelic trust, effulgent faces yearning for acceptance, two little brats filled to the brim with naïveté and the complete vulnerability of youth.

Before rounding the corner at the end of the hall, Emily whispered ever so softly into Break's ear and he paused a moment to listen. Smiling quietly, he doubled back and soundlessly peeked in Reim's room to make absolutely certain he _had_ remembered to close those curtains against the bright morning sun.

...


	8. Chapter 8

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

...

Eliot wouldn't say he loved public libraries, but neither would he say they disgusted him. He merely saw them as impractical, and if it weren't for the incessant pestering of his best friend he wouldn't be standing in one at all. He frankly didn't understand this hobby of Leo's - choosing to waste the better part of a perfectly good morning, locking himself inside like a mole afraid of sunlight, digging through shelves upon shelves for that one perfect book. It had to be something well used and yellowed along the edges, smelling sweetly of musty-moldy age, pages smeared with mysterious Cheeto-colored prints tragically warped by stains of drip-wept coffee.

And maybe even boogers. Eliot dropped his book on the librarian's cart with a loud sound of displeasure, backing away like a man facing the possibility of being eaten alive. Leo's exasperated sigh caused Eliot to growl in return, face fuming, hands clutched at his sides. (From that moment on each decided to purposefully subvert the other's short-fused impatience via mutual avoidance. A mere three steps dissipated the anger, however; it never lasted long between them.)

In Eliot's humble opinion, any book worth reading would already reside within his own private collection. (So what if it consisted solely of _Holy Knight _volumes? That was the point _exactly!_) If Leo wanted a book less worthy of Eliot's own shelving space, the Nightray manor itself had a library or three. But, no, Leo wanted something _different_, something they _didn't have_, and therefore Eliot found himself meandering a directionless path through shelves upon shelves of ill-kept tomes, trying his best to stay occupied while Leo ran off to discover whatever.

Turning past one particularly bland corner, Eliot found himself in an equally bland section of the library. He stared, rather unimpressed, at a set of books tipped over upon themselves, tumbling down like little Humpty Dumpties, all splattered and cracked upon the ground. Sighing, he stood over the mess and glanced about. Seeing no other living being wasting its precious breath in such a time-and-dust choked graveyard, he took responsibility onto his own noble shoulders and slid hands from pockets to straighten unsightly disarray. Careful to not disturb surrounding tomes (lest they totter precariously upon weakened shelves and topple upon intrusive hands or heads) Eliot replaced scattered books to match proper sequences. Stepping back to survey his handiwork, he nodded with satisfied approval and fluttered a grin. (Apparently all the King's horses and all the King's men didn't have access to the aid of a sturdy metal bookend. _Couldn't put Humpty together again_, indeed.)

Dusting his hands with a quick _swish-swish_, he decided to explore the rest of the building's brown-and-boring interior, silently hoping there was treasure yet to be found in the midst of this dark, bleak cavern.

He hardly bothered to cover his yawn after he turned the next corner (vaguely remembering to do so because he had been taught gentlemanly manners at a young age and Vanessa made sure he _always practiced them_) but as his hand moved away from his face something caught his uninterested gaze. He continued past, dully turning down the next aisle, but a mild sense of curiosity buzzed in the back of his brain and he stopped to retrace his steps. Perusing several shelves, for he wasn't sure _what_ exactly had grabbed at his attention, he finally discovered that piece of the puzzle which didn't belong, thoughtlessly thrown on a shelf nearest the floor. Pausing to halfheartedly disguise yet another yawn, he reached forward with his left hand and promptly found himself scowling flame-heated daggers through the cover of something someone dared have the audacity to squirrel away _here_. This was the fiction area, for goodness' sake, and this book _didn't_ _at all_ belong with fiction! With a sigh and an eye-rolling lament for the future of such uncaring, uneducated individuals, Eliot flipped the lost little thing under his arm and trudged to the other end of the library on a quest to find its proper shelf, wondering why he was so bored as to play the part of a lone Adventuring Librarian when he could be finding much better ways to waste his time. (Oh, right: Leo. He was here because of _Leo_.)

With an unhappy frown at the memory of their most recent dispute, Eliot threw himself over the back of a chair and figured he may as well _read _while he waited, desperate to discover a foolproof method of passing the time. He lackadaisically tossed his captive in front of himself and skimmed past random pages, noting with growing distaste that it actually would have helped him write his final history paper - had he known the book existed at the time. Mildly frustrated, Eliot slammed the cover shut and hung his head over the back of the chair, choosing instead to count the infinite number of holes in the ceiling as he waited.

Really, he had nothing better to do.

Nothing at all.

As time passed, his unfocused eyes glazed over, reflecting less and less light as they slithered shut. He dreamily watched as those colorful things of the mind's imagination began to appear from secret hiding places at the edges of consciousness, tiptoeing out with cautious ease to guide him toward great lands of castles and chivalry. His open mouth hung slack and his throat became dry, but he was no longer aware of his body while he floated amid the cobblers and squires of old, daring to become a true and honorable knight in the face of times long since past.

"That looks painful," Leo chirped, amused smile flitting across his sun-pink face. Skinny arms unloaded a stack of books on the table with more noise than was necessary, jarring Eliot back into reality.

"...shaddup," he mumbled, massaging the back of his neck, noting with distaste that it was a bit stiff. He rolled his shoulders and sat forward in a slouch, dully placing his chin atop the table.

Leo tapped Eliot on the forehead. It earned him a dark-eyed glare, so he smiled brightly in return. "You're a complete grouch today."

"This is incredibly boring. _Incredibly_ boring."

"That's because you're an idiot," Leo said. "Smart people _enjoy_ visiting libraries when they have nothing better to do."

"Smart people are dumb," Eliot countered, looking pointedly at Leo.

"You're dumb," Leo replied, returning the glare.

"You just admitted I'm smart."

Leo adjusted his glasses and fluffed a few stray bangs to their proper places in front of his face. Eliot didn't fully understand why, when the habit seemed so _backwards_, but Leo was Leo and Leo had quirks. "Your argument is terrible, Eliot, and your logic is even worse."

"_You're_ terrible. This trip is nothing but torture!" Eliot whined, trying to not appear quite as impatient as he was. Unfortunately, the way Leo leaned back with a smile told him he was doing a miserable job. It was almost embarrassing, but Eliot was a pure-blooded Nightray and he absolutely refused to let something as trivial as this burrow beneath his skin.

Leo stood and gently pushed his chair underneath the table, careful to avoid any unnecessary clanging of metal upon metal. Waving a hand at the books he said, "I'm done, by the way."

"Really?" Eliot asked, immediately excited; fully attentive.

"I need to check them out before we leave."

"Sure," Eliot replied with what he hoped was a nonchalant shrug. (He could wait that long. He knew he could.)

With an affirmative nod Leo gathered his stack of books and led the way to the counter while Eliot trailed along behind, kicking his own chair in place with blatant disregard for the library's gold-embossed rules of silence. With his hands tucked snug inside their pockets, the first real smile of the day dared appear on Eliot's handsomely ill-tempered face. It had grown into a full-throttled grin upon exiting the library, despite Eliot's need to shoulder a newly acquired burden (Leo had passed the stack of heavy tomes to Eliot, who hardly noticed, he was so happy to be out of that hellhole). But the smile decided to wither and fall as the boys found themselves standing out in the pouring rain.

The weather had been gorgeously sunny when they first arrived.

Eliot grumbled a handful of curses; Leo ignored him entirely. Making note of the lengthy walk home, as well as the occupied state of Eliot's hands, Leo kindly decided to hold the umbrella. But he chose to do so over the books.

_Only_.

...

It had taken Reim the better part of a week to locate those blasted files, given the difficulty of maneuvering through the black hole of Pandora's records department. He couldn't blame the organization for its lack of orderliness, as all these documents were very much ordinary and nobody was officially assigned to maintain such an outdated section, but it certainly would have been convenient if _Pandora went paperless like the rest of the civilized world. _Sighing, Reim thumbed through several more pages of absolute nonsense, tired eyes glossing past another few hundred names immortalized in too-small typeface.

(The ancient journal he had taken from the Barma library - which was now back in its proper place with the other fifty things he had borrowed,_ thank you very much_ - had caught his eye because one of the worn and brittle pages had been desecrated by a curious smearing of red. Reim knew for a fact they didn't write in bright-bold scarlet one hundred years ago - he'd bled his eyes over enough old records to know - so the unusual color caught his attention immediately. The name of the Duke House mentioned within the hastily scribbled message served to make things more complicated, but at least he had a starting point for his investigation.)

_Ctx L. H4/PNDRA._

That was all the information his red-inked message bled for him. If not for the alarming warning contained within it, the whole sneaking-in-and-stealing-out-with-Barma's-secret-stuff escapade would have been for naught. As it was, he only knew this much:

_Legal Contract. Baskerville in Pandora._

With his face set in a grim scowl of determination, Reim began searching for any mention of a Baskerville within their ranks. If true, it would make for an incredibly disconcerting occurrence, as that House was notorious for antagonizing Pandora at every available opportunity. However, after leafing past the final three hundred and thirty-odd names, Reim's quiet fears eased. Not a single Baskerville had ever registered on Pandora's roster. (That was good. Infiltration of their organization by those loathsome monsters at least wasn't _blatantly_ obvious; he _still_ shivered when he thought of Lily and her hateful dog.) He almost breathed a sigh of relief, but his tired eyes reminded him the time for celebration had not yet come, flicking suspiciously to a name near the end of the index encircled by a generous helping of bright-bright scarlet. With another sigh Reim pushed his chair back and readied himself to face the wearisome task of fighting those disintegrating filing cabinets again.

...

The name belonged to an agent who once worked in the field department, directly involved in the capture and containment (_execution,_ more the like) of illegal contractors and their Chains. The man's name was faded; the printer's cartridge had obviously run low as it spat his file amid the dozens of others processed at the same time. The contents of the agent's history was difficult to read, but the smile on his face, staring back at Reim from a dead sheet of paper, was quite unnerving: white teeth set too straight, eyes glittering too bright-dark, face tinged with too sharp a side of madness. Clearly he was a bonafide veteran of the force. (They all seemed to go mad at the end...just look at Xerxes Break. And, no, Reim hadn't forgiven that fool candy-munching jackass for _anything_ yet.)

A note was jotted on an attached piece of paper, stapled haphazardly somewhere in the middle of the file; half-defeated, half-alive, it gasped for breath from a burial place beneath pages and pages of assignment summaries, field reports, and performance reviews. It seemed almost to be yearning for discovery: a single yellow flower struggling to grow amid a refuse of waste; a lone, shivering spark trying to breathe from within a nightmare of darkness and despair. Without giving it a second thought, Reim ripped the page from its manilla file body and smoothed time-pressed creases from a bent and scarred middle.

The note spoke a different, much longer story than the one he had expected, stuttering half-coherent fragments filled with a generous helping of nearly indecipherable shorthand abbreviations. It was only because Reim had studied materials like this for so many meticulous years that he had a _chance_ of freeing the message before him, letting it narrate in a long-forgotten, time-wasted voice. It told the story of a young boy, orphaned by a father too desperate for a past which could never be; a man who revoked his privileges as a well-respected agent to throw away both his life and his son's future by becoming an illegal contractor. The agent's suicide was ultimately committed via a drop in the Abyss, and instead of luggage, he brought the mandatory handful of too-many-too-innocent people as his Chain desperately attempted to avoid that one Fate Inevitable. (And it was all because of the passing of a dearly beloved woman.)

It was the typical, sad tale,leaving Reim with an empty, heavy heart because yet another of their own had been driven to such wretched depths, twisted into the very thing he had hunted most of his adult life. Reim heard whispers of it happening within his own generation, but Pandora usually found methods of altering the story, keeping it quiet, locking it away. There was much this organization left secret. But the truth was still here, wriggling and writhing in these dusty back rooms. Maybe that was why nobody had ever thought to search.

(Dead secrets don't lunge for your throat.)

Running a tired hand over his face, Reim scratched his head and stared blankly at the room's cream colored walls. There was something more, he knew, something Xerxes was specifically searching for. So far, this wasn't it.

The file itself wasn't quiteas old as he had first guessed. The final date, issued ten years ago, put the agent in his mid-thirties at his time of death. Plenty old enough to have been a veteran of his division, yet it seemed too early to have become depraved enough to leave a child alone at such a young age...

Inspired, Reim stood, threw on his coat, stuffed everything into his briefcase (even if it _was_ technically an illegal breach of protocol to remove such files from the building, he obviously didn't care for the rules like he used to) and made for the door. He had a Nightray-owned orphanage to visit.

...

Returning to the Manor, all Leo wanted to do was read. Predictably, that wasn't what Eliot wanted to do, but since it was still raining there wasn't much else to suggest in its stead. So after changing into drier clothes, Leo wrapped himself in a colorfully knitted afghan and flopped on his belly in the middle of the living room floor. His gigantic pile of borrowed books stood within easy reaching distance; he promptly dove into one while Eliot grabbed a seat on the sofa and selected something from the top. Peering at the cover, he raised an eyebrow, noting with detached curiosity that it was the same book he had become acquainted with whilst whittling away time in the library. Skimming to a center page, Eliot yawned and settled back among the pillows. He gently placed the book upon his face, folded his hands over his stomach, and quietly fell asleep.

Several hours later, Eliot awoke to the gentle sounds of his mother's piano. He remained on the couch, silent and still, with ears open and eyes closed. Leo's hands, whispering a musical ballet, sang forth pianissimo images of loneliness and lullabies. Eliot heard the accompanying staccato of crinkling, time-stiff pages; the punctuated shifting of a bench between measures; the quiet _hmm_ of concentration when Leo's eyes decided they didn't want to focus on the paper but did so anyway. (It meant he was thinking about his family again. Leo never expressed into words that which remained alive in the deepest shadows of his heart, translating only through the movements of his hands. At times like this it was difficult for him to focus on those written realities standing before wide-open, hidden eyes when all he wanted to do was let it _breathe, _that suffering thing inside him.)

Eliot counted beats in his mind and analyzed notes from behind closed eyelids. He composed as Leo wrote (he knew it would take less effort to peer over Leo's shoulder and glimpse the music itself, but that was all the way _over there_ and he was still rather comfortable _right here)_, imagining the concerto as it was played because he was a composer himself and could do such things when he deigned pay attention.

After the last chords whispered themselves into imperceptibility, Leo padded into the living room, afghan hanging from his shoulders and gently sweeping the floor behind. Eliot waited until Leo settled into the novel he'd left abandoned while satisfying that momentary desire to play, listening patiently for the sounds of shifting and rustling to cease. Once he was convinced his friend had traveled past the boundaries of a realm barely contained behind the illusory bars of printed words, Eliot sat up with a grunt and a heave, deliberately dropping his book upon the glassy surface of the coffee table. (His was a wicked grin when it clattered a perfectly unpleasant racket.) He watched Leo's shoulders jump and multiple pages swirl as surprised fingers released their binding holds.

"Way to be an ass," Leo said, voice completely neutral.

Eliot laughed.

"Did I wake you?" Leo asked, meandering from his place on the floor to sit beside Eliot, aiming a swat or two at his friend's head.

"Nah. 'Twas the pigeons," Eliot grinned, dodging the second swipe; it was usually the more vicious of the two.

"Volume ten," Leo said.

"Chapter nineteen."

"Page 148."

"Paragraph six; first sentence!" Eliot triumphed, stealing Leo's next line, celebrating his victory over this round of _Holy Knight _trivia with a look of smug self-satisfaction.

"...quoth Templar Todd."

Eliot scowled. "You did that on purpose."

"I like to win."

Eliot threw a pillow at Leo's face. It hit its mark and startled Leo into losing his balance, but failed miserably to erase the widening mirth beneath. Unperturbed, Eliot stretched his legs atop the coffee table and leaned back with hands folded behind his head. He continued to ignore Leo's subsequent struggles to upright himself without losing hold of the heavy afghan, and instead closed his eyes, recounting the piano's melody. He watched tiny black notes roll a drip-drop slideshow against his eyelids; composing and rearranging, breathing new life from within the old, molding the music's elasticity to better suit his purposes. He opened an eye. "Duet?"

"What?"

"That song you just played. By...whatever-his-name-was."

Leo waved it off. "We'll save that for another day."

"Why?"

"Because I know you won't be satisfied until you've had a sufficient amount of time to plan things out beforehand. You're exceedingly fussy when we improvise; it's a rather obnoxious habit."

"Your _attitude_ is obnoxious."

Leo sighed and reached past Eliot, seeking the book which had been left atop the coffee table. Reading its cover, Leo raised an eyebrow. "A musical anthology?" he asked, incredulous. "For _you?_ To _read_?"

"_I_ left it on the table. _You_ brought it home," Eliot responded with a glower.

"You were a moron for not stopping me," Leo replied, disbelief still evident in his voice.

"Hey!" Eliot yelled. Dropping his feet to the ground, he sat with shoulders tense and a challenge directed at Leo's eye. (Or, rather, what he _hoped_ was Leo's eye; it was sometimes hard to tell if those ridiculous lenses were centered or not.) "Wanna make something of it?"

Leo chuckled, sitting more comfortably against the arm of the sofa, drawing his legs toward his chest to better cradle the book. He perused several articles, forcing Eliot to sit back with a sigh and _relax for once,_ before he turned the page and found something worth sharing. "Oh, look," he said excitedly, pointing to an aged photograph featuring a man in a pristine white cloak. Arrogant eyes, sharp and hawkish, stared blankly ahead as a woman sat beside, her soft smile reflecting hidden humor. Leo grinned. "This angry one looks just like you."

"Does not!" Eliot hollered, horrified. (It wasn't an association Eliot wanted: being compared to an overweight, balding middle-aged gentleman known for writing the most outrageously eccentric ballads of his time. Even if the man had been famous, he had also been a complete nutcase.)

Leo grinned and set the book down. "Fine, fine," he said, showing his empty palms to make peace. "You're uglier."

Changing the subject, Eliot grunted through gritted teeth, "It was _Chopin_ you were playing before."

"Yes," Leo affirmed. His smile had since evaporated.

"We'll remix it."

"...rearrange?"

"No, I said _remix_." Eliot shifted his eyes to Leo. They were hardened and focused, fully engaged in what his siblings dubbed as his Serious Mode: the one in which he wrote. He had an idea and he didn't want to lose it.

Leo smiled and gazed toward the ceiling, adjusting his grip on the afghan. He'd let Eliot's creativity wander where it would. (Music was a basic necessity for the both of them. Leo to heal, Eliot to live.) "Whatever you say, Eliot. Whatever you say."

...

Eliot never mentioned it during a conversation. (But his narrowed eyes did observe.)

He had begun to notice a pattern whenever he left Leo alone long enough to play solo. Strangely, Leo's favorites (or perhaps the _only_ pieces he could recall from the tips of his fingers?) came from a single composer. He never deviated. It reminded Eliot greatly of the first time he had compared Leo to Enigma and Enigma to Leo.

Leo with music was Enigma in that long-ago chat room. His creations, whether musical or literarily insightful, were pliable and diversified. Alive and _different_. He didn't need the presence of physical notes to create, harmonize, or pour forth something of beauty. He just _knew how to play_.

Leo _without_ music was Leo without Enigma. His professional talent - pure musical genius! - became static. Unchanging. Unoriginal. He had the facts, and he certainly had the memory, but he didn't have the magic at his fingertips to create something new.

His talent seemed to evaporate.

It was strange; bothersome, even. But Eliot could smell a potential fight brewing from a mile away, and he was smart enough to back down from the ones he wouldn't win. (Whether he heeded his own intuition, however, was a much different story.) There were some topics Leo refused to address, and Eliot had the sneaking suspicion this would be one of them. For simplicity's sake he chose to keep his thoughts to himself; he knew from experience Leo wouldn't spill _anything _if he felt harassed.

So, for now Eliot chose to wave away his concerns until a better time. Tapping his foot to the rhythm of the piano, all he really wanted was to remain where he was, leaning comfortably against the wall, enjoying an afternoon with his best friend. He was listening to good music and contemplating the possibility of joining in once a new melody began. (The subconscious part of him remembered the way invisible burdens seemed to lift from Leo's small shoulders whenever they played together, and his mind made itself up.)

He pushed away from the wall to take a seat beside Leo. Slapping his newly finished rendition of Chopin over the music already in place, Eliot slipped old papers from behind and tossed them to the floor. Leo could return to those stuffy old songs once they finished with _his _new one. But for now this was something _Eliot_ wanted to play and he wasn't about to try it out alone.

_E'lodea Dis._

...


	9. Chapter 9

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

...

_Chains...,_ Xerxes mused, tucking Emily in her little bed for a mid-afternoon nap. The poor dear had already fallen asleep on his shoulder, gasping high-pitched snores into the shell of his ear. He didn't mind.

Staring sightlessly out the window and over what he remembered to be the Reinsworth gardens, Break let his mind wander over his current situation. By now, he knew, Reim would be hot on the trail of whatever it was he had found in the library. And if Break's guess was correct, Reim would spend all _year_ excavating Pandora's most dreadful files before he spotted the faintest glimmerings of success with those squeaky-clean spectacles of his. Unless he discovered a shortcut, that was.

Break sighed. Waiting was always so difficult. But he had little choice, with his sight stolen and a stubborn refusal to leap ahead until all was ready, a predicament which left him hanging on gossamer threads of nothing until Reim's return. (A wait which would doubtless stretch into the next millennia, if Reim chose thoroughness over efficiency. Xerxes didn't need a report of the whole damn place, just the words "go" or "stop" or "not yet" - so long as the message was accompanied with "you've got the right guy".)

Deciding to leave Emily as she lay, Break settled for taking a leisurely stroll through his closet. He reappeared quietly in a room some two floors above and a handful over in whichever direction such rooms happened to lie. Nowadays, he was the only one who entered this private chamber; the doors were locked years ago on Lady Cheryl's orders. It wasn't good for a young child to dwell in her dead mother's room, she said. Nor was it good for the fragile soul of her half-sighted servant. Xerxes had nearly grinned at that, deciding on the spot to disobey just to be contrary. (He learned quickly not to push his boundaries, however. Lady Cheryl Reinsworth had a mean streak about her, well camouflaged by a veneer of soft pleasantries. Where else would he have learned to play his own part so well, if not from her?)

Lady Shelly's room still smelled of perfume - jasmine or gardenia, he didn't remember which, nor if there was any difference. He just knew it was a comforting smell, reminding him of sunny days spent outside with her and her daughter and their borrowed loud-mouthed servant, learning to live again for the first time.

But, alas, dwelling on such memories only brought the faintest of smiles before turning to melancholy, so he pushed reemerging reminisces aside and sat on Lady Shelly's windowsill because it always did have the better view. Not that he could see anymore, of course, but he could still feel her gentle presence behind him while he gazed out at a beautiful garden in full bloom of darkness, not quite remembering why her viewing angle was better than his but knowing it was.

Leaning against the wide, white frame, he pretended to hear the silks of her skirts shir-shirring this way and that as she moved toward a chair and contemplated him while he contemplated the world. The plod-plod of her tiny daughter's shoes as she raced around the room. The background filled with the noise of little Reim scolding either one of them: her for running in the house or him for wandering in the Lady's room without permission yet again.

Silly Reim. He never thought that perhaps grownups talked amongst themselves when the children were away and sleeping; that perhaps _he'd_ thought it odd to be invited and welcomed at any time; that perhaps _she_ was the one who let him in until it became habit to see her whenever he was troubled. (And in those days, he was troubled most of the time.)

She reminded him so much of the graceful Lady Sinclair, and Sharon like the bubbly little Miss. (Reim didn't have a counterpart in Kevin's past, but somehow Break could see him hovering in the background of the Sinclair household, scolding somebody for something. It was enough to make him laugh, quietly, mindful of loud noises. He'd hate to break the spell this room still held, hate to chase off the ghost of his beloved Lady Shelly.) It was no wonder she was the one who healed him, taught him life was worth continuing, even if this world was not his own. That there was retribution and redemption, if only he chose to find his way. Disillusioned and disoriented, it had seemed as if his Lady Sinclair was the one urging him forward, but when he learned to see through the blearing pain, it had been Lady Shelly by his side, Lady Shelly supporting him.

He hadn't known she was ill.

But, past aside, for the umpteenth time, the quietness of her room helped him think. And right now he needed to think about Chains. Eques was keeping an eye on Reim, and Emily, being a minor Chain herself - having escaped the Abyss by hitching a ride on some illegally contracted something or another, too small and insignificant to be missed, too weak to be noticed - was able to relate Eques' reports to him directly. (That seemed to be her power: eavesdropping on the conversations of other Abyssal creatures. Helpful, that. No wonder they made such good friends.)

So, with Eques and Emily in the mix - watching over Reim because they all knew how incredibly helpful that March Hare was in a pinch - Break decided it was safe to settle back and relax while he took his time developing a plan. He figured the other Chain was bound to show itself sometime. According to his calculations, it was already past its due.

The Mad Hatter didn't like to be kept waiting.

...

The House of Fianna stood as eerily in this mess of ancient destruction as it had the last time Reim had the misfortune of trudging his miserable way here. He hated wandering through Sabrie. He hated visiting the orphanage. The place displayed such an ominous aura, and no matter how thick his coat nor how hot the summer, it was always chilly when he walked through those tall front doors. He was greeted by the cheerful faces of watchful women, nuns who kept sharp eyes on him as he displayed his Pandora crest and requested to see their records. They couldn't refuse, so he was led to a large, drafty room and left among the rat-nibbled files (at least they were off the floor, having been haphazardly assigned to a hundred tottering shelves. The House of Fianna had been a convent, once, before it became an orphanage. A lot of old writings sought shelter here, after the Great Disaster). As far as the secretive sisters were concerned, he'd never find anything of substance in these cobweb-encrusted mires of mental misery. He had no doubt they were right.

Which was exactly why he was sneaking around the back of the library, running his hands along the wall, feeling for strange indentations or clicks or other such abnormalities. Or perhaps he was simply looking for something like that foot-tripping tile - the one which unexpectedly depressed beneath his left boot and sent him stumbling for the space of a conspicuously absent heartbeat.

He regained his balance and eyed the change in scenery, now facing a classic revolving bookshelf. He'd honestly expected more of a challenge, but then he remembered he wasn't in the Barma household: there was no need for advanced security. He chuckled to himself, stepped atop the platform, and swung the revolving panel gently to the other side.

Reim walked into a much better kept room, recently polished and dusted, filled with files alphabetically organized (imagine that). He promptly went to work, surprised to discover several references to the Baskerville name. He had always thought the family to be more of a covert occultist clan and less of an actual Duke House, but apparently they didn't _always_ take care of their own by snatching them from the face of the earth, hiding every trace behind a veil of subterfuge and trickery impenetrable to the rest of society. Oh, wait, there he was forgetting that was _exactly what the House of Fianna did_, except it was run by Pandora instead of that particular Duke House.

Well. There were his so-called "Baskervilles in Pandora." They simply decided to throw all their kids here, letting Pandora do the tricking while they gathered the treats.

One mystery solved.

Reim wiped his glasses on his shirt, careful to guard them against squeaking (they legitimately needed wiping down; it was rather dusty walking through the first room) and continued his methodical plunge, emptying the entirety of the Baskerville's cavity, searching, searching, searching...for exactly that.

One child fell neatly into his timeframe. A lone, disheveled soul brought in some seven years ago, orphaned and forgotten by disease-rotten parents. He was a current resident, even, grinning an awfully familiar smile beneath heavily shrouded eyes...

_Dammit, Xerxes, you irritating asshole,_ Reim thought. _If you already knew everything, why did you insist on making me do the research? We're right back at the beginning!_

Reim sighed and ran a tired hand over his face. He had no idea what to do. After a long moment of mindlessly drumming his fingers on his right cheek, he slid the contents of the kid's file into his briefcase and replaced the documents with a handful of blank papers. He wedged the file in place on its designated shelf, revolved himself out of the room, and carefully meandered around the main library, pretending to search for something which hid he knew not where.

...

He left the House of Fianna several hours later, looking as frustrated as he could manage (thinking about Xerxes Break helped), professing several times that _of course he had found what he was looking for, have a great day, Ma'am; no, the cobwebs would come right out of his jacket, he was fine, thanks; yes, he'd love to visit longer, but unfortunately he really had to be on his way. Really._

The children were nowhere to be seen, but after discovering the House of Fianna had an agenda of its own, hidden far beneath Pandora's surveillance (no doubt due to the influence of the Baskerville children planted there as either spies or research projects; he wasn't sure which yet) it made sense the nuns would keep them away from uniformed agents. They were opponents in this little game, had been opponents since before the Tragedy, even if Pandora itself hadn't officially existed at that time. (It was more of a smattered alliance between a few of the fledgling Dukedoms to keep out a certain Family of Freaks...but that was irrelevant to the topic at hand.)

The trip back to the Barma Estate was uneventful, for which Reim was inordinately thankful. He parked his car in the servant's lot and tossed his keys on their peg by the kitchen entrance. Grabbing a quick bite to eat, he slithered up to his room as quietly as a mouse toting a briefcase far too heavy for it to properly handle.

...

The files from the orphanage sketched a brief overview of a procedure forced upon Fianna's children upon admittance. After being given a "calming" concoction to help them adjust, the children complained of dizziness. A few hours' rest put them back on their feet, at which point they forgot their old lives and ran smiling into the new. Reim could smell the rot beneath the pretty words. Humpty Dumpty always did prefer the vibrant imaginations of the young.

However, given the copious amount of mis-matching papers stuffed in the back of this certain child's file, Reim could tell something had gone awry. Something terrible had derailed those carefully laid plans and routine procedures, and Fianna hadn't been prepared to deal with it.

The vial was drained and the child left alone. That in itself was a bit unorthodox. But a scream, prolonged and anguished, brought the sisters running back. A backlash, quite severe (yet ill defined), had thrown the child into a coma for several days. He awoke with a violent disposition. He turned murderous when agitated. Left in complete isolation, he returned to his normal, sullen nature. Quiet and harmless until provoked. But once provoked, the cycle would start anew. (They left the child in solitary confinement for three months before he ceased snarling at them. Before he refrained from biting them. Before he stopped acting like a feral animal and his eyes finally changed from glassy to lucid. Three months before he found his humanity, before he realized he had killed one of the sisters. Oddly enough, he didn't much seem to care.)

Reim leafed through the files from Pandora, searching for anything...anything at all which could lead him to the truth. Instead, he found the note from the ancient Barma journal, handwritten in bright red.

_Contract is legal. Beware Baskervilles in Pandora._

Reim's eyes burrowed into the message until it smoked and ignited. _Contract is legal. Contract is legal. Contract is legal. Legal legal legal legal legal..._

And suddenly it made sense.

_They weren't talking about the father._

The child's father had forced _his own_ blood-sealing mirror onto his child! In the void, he himself had taken an illegal contract. Humpty-Dumpty's blood had done something to corrupt the mirror's contract, creating a backlash. That mistake had taken a toll on the child's sanity.

_Or had it?_

No, Reim found it difficult to believe. There was something else going on here. Something that didn't involve insanity, fabricated personalities, head trauma, or imaginary friends, but rather involved the maddening influence of the Abyss. There was a reason contracts weren't shared among Pandora's members.

Apparently, it was a very good one.

Reim sighed, having finished the task he had been charged, and began reorganizing everything he had borrowed, preparing to replace it when he wasn't so tired. Something amid the mess caught his attention, and he realized one of Fianna's files had turned itself over amid his shuffling. Stamped across the back, its big-bold letters screaming, was something Reim hadn't expected to see. Standing with no small amount of alarm, the chair clattered aside and his eyes went blurry. He held his spinning head in both hands.

He wasn't researching Leo's file after all.

...

"Well, I suspected as much," Xerxes muttered over a teacup containing three parts sugar to one part tea.

"I figured," Reim said, staring sulkily into his own drink.

"Oh, now, now, Reim-san. Don't be like that. It's not like you found yourself in danger."

"No, but it wasn't necessary! Why in the world would you make me go through all of _that _to confirm your suspicions? Now I'm swamped, trying to finish _your work_ at headquarters, guilty of going AWOL behind my master's back after _trespassing and stealing_ from him, and then doing the same with both Pandora and Fianna!"

"That's all your fault, isn't it?" Break chuckled. "I only asked you to look into the matter, not become a criminal in the process."

"I hate you."

"You lie; we both know it. Don't bother trying to object. You'll only stutter over your own tongue and embarrass yourself further."

Reim found it hard to remain in control after that, but years of dealing with Xerxes Break had prepared him for at least that much. Instead of screaming a frustrated retort, he stood rigid and still, breathing heavily, face boiling red, and promptly toppled onto his backside when he found his feet kicked out from under him. "Wha-Xerxes? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT FOR?"

"Shh~, Reim-san. You'll wake our neighbors three countries distant."

"Don't tell me to 'shh!'"

"Be _quiet_, you noisy brat."

The look in Break's leveled gaze was enough to shut Reim up. Climbing to his feet, he huffed and dusted himself off, regained his seat, and glared right back. Xerxes didn't look away, his pale face remaining impassive and unreadable, so Reim had to look down first.

"Alright," Reim said. "I'll listen."

Xerxes' face promptly split into his signature grin. "Wonderful."

...

It wasn't a rare occurrence to find the two of them walking side-by-side through Pandora's busy halls, but it was an abnormality to see Xerxes carrying a briefcase while Reim's hands remained empty. However, the oddity of the situation was negated as Break enthusiastically swung his burden by his side, occasionally swiping the back of Reim's knees with the corner. The ensuing reprimand was bellowed loudly enough for no one to take notice, and so it was that they entered the records room without anyone pausing to give other curiosities a second thought.

As far as the perusal of files was concerned, Xerxes was of little help. However, he had no reason to misbehave on this rarest of rare occasions, and Reim was eternally grateful for the silence, his concentration happily uninterrupted by loud candy-crunches. Reim worked steadily, pilfered filing cabinets and records shelves, stacking reims upon reims (ha ha, Xerxes, ha ha) on the desk in front of his blind friend. He didn't ask how, but the doll Emily voiced the names littering files like so much graffiti. Break, in turn, scowled until his face became tired, at which point he settled for not reacting at all because nothing was exactly right yet.

They were on a search for missing individuals who had disappeared within the last ten years in events not directly related to an event caused by an illegal contractor. (Ha ha, Reim, ha ha. You bring up the name 'Kevin Regnard' one more time and I'll murder you where you stand. No, 'Red-Eyed Ghost' won't help you retain your rapidly shortening life, you brat.)

Needless to say, they didn't make much progress.

...

The maid slipped a key into the lock separating her from Rufus Barma's main library, located in the middle of the first floor. It was large and spaciously ornate, everything she had expected it to be, complete with unopened tomes and volumes of knowledge written yet never read. (It seemed contradictory in this household, but she wasn't one to judge.) Instead, she settled for flitting through the vast aisles, searching for wherever secret documents might be hid. Nobody told her where to start looking; the library simply seemed the most logical place.

She searched past hundreds of tomes, looking for anything of value, but mostly looking for a body. _That_ was something Jubjub knew how to operate, but it would be exceedingly helpful if the new body knew how to _read_. This one was apparently illiterate, and that in itself provided a setback to their plans, as Jubjub was forced to rely on the knowledge of the body he inhabited to made infiltration work at all. So, despite being a maid in a library, he felt more like an English major searching vaults of advanced mathematical equations, trying to find what exactly X equaled.

Frustrated, the maid let out a little shriek and a stomp of her foot. Nobody noticed, of course, as nobody was in the room, but it served to make Jubjub feel better, so he continued stomping down the aisle he was currently browsing, pulling books at random, looking for pictures that might help his cause. Seeing as no book thus far held any pictures of any sort, he wasn't having much luck, either.

...

Several hours later found the maid tipping back an ornate, highly polished hard-backed chair, feet upon the edge of a corresponding reading table, one hand tapping long nails while the other kept the chair from tipping too far out of control. The gum she chewed smacked loudly; the song she whistled between odd chews screeched.

Then the door opened.

Dropping the chair down, Jubjub stumbled from her seat and wheeled around, pink bubble half-formed on her plump little lips, standing awkwardly, conscious of her own state of disarray. (Skirts rumpled from flopping this way and that upon the library's great throw rugs, hair undone because she scratched her head when annoyed, gum more than probably stuck to a few errant strands across her cheek.)

But then Jubjub realized worrying was quite foolish, for here was a perfect opportunity to make progress. Without another word, the body of the pretty-pretty maid made a pretty-pretty slap as it fell to the floor and lost consciousness, having suddenly purged itself of a soul.

Reim never knew what hit him.

...

The girl awoke hours later, dazed and confused. Stumbling, she wandered out and was promptly arrested, her arms seized by a man with the most awful looking blood-red eye she had ever seen. His hair was as white as death, his smile eerie and terrible. She tried to scream, but suddenly she couldn't, and before she knew what was happening, she had fainted.

(It wasn't easy lugging her dead weight around, but somehow Break managed to get her back where she belonged. Reim owed him _big_ for this.)

...

Traveling around the Barma mansion was much more interesting in the body of this young male, the one his mistress had originally picked out as Jubjub's most suitable target. As their benefactor, Isla Yura, had once said: they needed to scope out information in the most efficient manner possible by finding the source. This guy was apparently the spring of knowledge Jubjub had needed to find.

Reim Lunettes knew _everything_!

The files were on his desk; the notes there beside. Everything of value was tucked away in a little briefcase on the bed, with names and numbers of any agent of Pandora Yura didn't already have. Besides that, Reim's head was filled with knowledge of the Barma household; information Yura would die to possess. This was an incredibly fortuitous circumstance, and Jubjub knew his mistress would be quite pleased.

Staring at the documents arranged on the desk before him, Jubjub let the body's mind wander through past memories and recent conclusions, telling him everything he'd ever needed to know. With this, with all of this, his mistress would have the upper hand on Isla Yura and the next move of the game would be theirs. The next _several_ moves, if he was careful.

Laughing quietly, Jubjub collected the briefcase, shoved the loose papers into it, grabbed the coat beside the door, and headed for the keys he knew to be hanging on a peg somewhere outside the kitchens.

It was their game, now.

...


	10. Chapter 10

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

...

There was a rumbling in the china. His teacup, upon closer inspection, had produced a spreading hairline crack through its garden of painted flowers, and from the looks of it, something was going to leak. Frowning, Isla Yura placed the defective piece upon its saucer and pushed a matching teapot away (similarly sporting fractures across pale, perfect surfaces), and was just about to summon his servants for a replacement set when curious ears discerned a thunderous noise, none too distant.

He half-rose from his chair when a lurch from the foundations told him he'd rather stay put. He grasped hold of the table while the dining room chandelier swung in great, jerking arcs, glass dress clack-clattering. The massive fixture swiveled and chattered, but after the initial rumble it ceased awkward movements - with only a few pieces broken - and settled on a strong length of polished chain. (Individual pieces quivered. Isla Yura looked at it, annoyed.)

The house was not at all quiet.

Outside the window, a storm exploded. It burst from a tranquil sky, tearing though fabric of empty azure. The world crumpled; broken shards seized and scattered as they materialized: dark as midnight cloaks. He paused, mesmerized (with painted claws clenching mahogany), and watched the beast outside warp and rage. A scream-silent phantom tore itself up the middle, drawing grand stage curtains aside to reveal terror in a form he was frightfully excited to see. An unblinking eye opened and focused - spotting _him, only him, and he _was_ trembling _- but all he could do in return was stare uselessly and gape. He had never seen a Chain so _enormous._

The Mad Hatter, on the other hand, was bloodshot: electric. Its piercing eye harbored concentric layers of chaos, and its contractor must have been equally deranged (for Yura was convinced no sane man could shelter such a brutal thing within his vile, candy-rotted corpse) because he strode boldly inside, presenting a ribbon-adorned invitation of straightforward pandemonium to the unsuspecting doorman - a man who quickly made himself invisible. Xerxes Break was both careless and purposeful, twirling his signature walking stick in one hand while his Chain severed the walls of the mansion behind in a cascade of concrete and crystal.

Yura hadn't known the Mad Hatter could do that.

Break walked unhurriedly, escorting himself from the entry to the dining room with linoleum and marble crumbling after white boots. He whistled a tune to chill the air, and Yura discovered his own slippered feet had begun to sweat. Shadows parted to reveal Break's politely smiling face, and suddenly all Yura could think of was how much he wished it were the great Jack Belzarius threatening to send him to the heart of Abyss instead of this ridiculous clown. It was almost an insult to the great works he'd accomplished.

"Knock, knock," Break said, disembodied voice lilting beneath a fog of settling stucco. The Mad Hatter drew to a mirage-like stop behind him, dramatic entry on hold. It didn't seem bothered, towering over scurrying servants, watching sinking rats abandon ship. (Half of the house stood as if nothing had happened; the other half as if nothing had existed. The midpoint rested on black phantom shoulders.)

Isla Yura smiled his welcome, wide and eerie, with sweat lining his forehead. He drank from his imperfect teacup, more to regain control than to satisfy thirst, and watched from the corner of considerably large eyes as Break waited pleasantly.

"You have a unique sense of humor," Break said, sharing a private joke between the two of them.

"Do I indeed?" The words warbled in that obnoxious manner Yura used when talking to those whose company he'd rather be rid of.

"Oh yes. Little Baskervilles spies."

Yura's smile widened. He brought his hands together in a bout of mock-applause. "Congratulations, Master Break. Congratu-_lations_."

Xerxes bowed in return, sweepingly over-exaggerated. "I imagine you've chosen them for a reason."

"Indeed. They make such delightful weeds, you understand. I've planted each _very_ carefully."

Break tittered. "In Fianna! Where they come to understand Pandora's movements around the heart of Sabrie," he said. "Very clever."

"I accept your compliment with grace."

"I would expect nothing less."

"I would expect more from _you_."

"I'm not yet finished."

"Do carry on." Another sip of tea.

Break smiled. "Your little ones will grow and return to their House. I would think you'd enjoy the opportunity to have them spy for you there."

"It is an immense success to have only been recently discovered," Yura replied, "after the damage has already taken hold." His palms were too warm; he replaced the teacup on the saucer. Both jittered.

Break flapped his sleeves. "We both know you don't enjoy collecting information for the sake of it; you leave that to Duke Stupid-Hair. What you want is something else, because when those kids grow up and waste their lives trying to resurrect their precious Glen, you're going to be the one with a front row seat." He paused to lean against his cane, tipping forward. "Selling it to Pandora, primarily, I would suspect. But I wouldn't put it past you to turn around and sell Pandora's whereabouts to the Baskervilles, to make certain the scales were even."

"Very good, Master Break," Yura chuckled. "That about sums it up."

"I almost forgot to comment on how well you've advertised your fictional paradise - leaving out the details of how much of a hellhole it is in reality, of course."

"As a gentleman, it is my duty to protect those who believe me from that which they should not see." Yura's grin was charming. He slid his gaze to a reflection of the Mad Hatter, wondering if it would move. Thus far it seemed content to flutter, hanging on strings of nothing. "No one said I had to tell the truth."

"That _would_ take the fun out of it," Break agreed. "The fact that you twisted the Duchess Nightray corroborates such an attestation! For only a _gentleman_ would take a mother from her children so he could manipulate her Chain into doing his dirty work for him. Only one as distinguished as yourself would kidnap servants who do not belong to you. And, for the record, you have an irritating tendency to get in my way."

"Please continue," Yura egged. "What you consider a list of atrocities is rather a long list of accomplishments I'm quite proud of."

Break's stare was flat. "Your selfish motivations have killed quite a few."

"We're not so different, are we?"

Break airily waved a hand. "Perhaps you're not an illegal contractor, Isla Yura, but as a representative of Pandora I cannot overlook your desire to take advantage of the Abyss' core. For that you will be disciplined. Nothing personal; it's simply in the job description."

This was his opportunity. Yura casually pushed his chair back. "I know what you truly desire," he proclaimed, standing to face Break properly. His voice was loud and edged with glee. "You want to own the heart as much as I! I can lead you to it, Master Break." He sneered a conspiratorial whisper: _"I can make it happen. I can make your wish come true."_

Break blinked. He gave Yura a long look.

"My servants can open that pathway, right here, in this mansion; your life's goal will be complete." He held out his hand, an invitation. "You could use its powers to see your beloved Shelly Reinsworth again! Again! She could _live_!"

"I'm sure she could," Break responded. In a quiet whisper of a moment, the menacing presence which had stood so silently behind Break vanished from Yura's sight. When it reappeared, the house came tumbling down.

...

Xerxes Break savored a deliciously moist cake (Lemon raspberry. Reim _was_ improving, although Break might need to acquire a second slice just to be sure - that frosting was awfully sweet), when he realized astounding irritation. He crossed long-sleeved arms and frowned, tipping back his chair.

Reim glanced over, but resumed leafing through a stack of old reports when he saw Xerxes' pout. Complaints would begin shortly, he knew: no reason to provoke early explosions.

Break had spent so much time anticipating (_expecting_) the Duchess Nightray to waltz out of nowhere with a pretentious, ostentatious flair - causing a riotous scene as she found a way to use Jubjub's peculiar abilities to her advantage - that he was annoyed _because she hadn't yet done so_. As far as he knew, she hadn't even entered the picture, and that possibility wasn't sitting well with his calculations. (He was beginning to feel restless, disappointed.)

Break grumbled and reached for the tea. Reim suffered a stroke of genius.

"I've got it."

"What?" Break muttered, barely audible. (He blew bubbles. The tea was cold and he wasn't about to remove himself from his comfortable perch to heat it.) Emily croaked in his stead: "If it's malignant, keep it!" But Reim was so absorbed in the newness of his revelation that he ignored Emily entirely; this caused Break to look up with a mild degree of interest.

Jubjub wasn't going to appear because it already _had_.

Break listened while Reim stumbled over hasty syllables in a rush to push out words with air, emptying both so he could race through the door, fearful of the possibility that Duke Barma's House was in danger. Apparently, from what Break could discern from the disjointed jumble, Reim had met a peculiar face on his way to do this or that - he couldn't remember; it didn't matter. He could not recall the name of the woman carrying fresh linens into the mansion on delivery day, could not remember her regular duties, and for the life of him, couldn't understand why she hadn't known the layout of the estate: every servant was required to memorize it before hire. (Oh, and Reim had lived there almost his entire life; he was pretty damn sure he _knew_ _everybody_.)

Reim left Break in Pandora's library while he went to see if carefully buried skeletons had been discovered or exhumed. Break, uncaring whether Barma's secrets lived or died, lounged with his feet on a desk and a pencil balanced across his upper lip. He waited and waited and waited, not quite seeing the bigger picture until it was much too late. Realizing the situation was a setup, a trap designed to catch Reim (for _he _was the most valuable secret Barma held_ - not the whereabouts of Barma's Gate to Abyss as Reim had feared_), Break stood; his chair clattered. The words which left his mouth weren't at all becoming, and he was almost ashamed for teaching them to dear Miss Emily, but then he remembered he was in the company of a Chain and not a little lady and her incessant cackling put him in a much better mood.

He went after Reim to confirm his conclusions, and of course his mood failed to do anything more than sour when he discovered he was right. For while the Duchess Nightray's scheme hadn't been nearly as extravagant as he had expected, Jubjub's footprints were still absurdly obvious in slippers of bright blue and not black. The frustration-wrecked library had been a mere appetizer - a temporary distraction - for preparing the main course, after which the garnish had been hastily discarded.

The maid, with her blue-but-not-black footwear, ran into Break in the hall. As much as Xerxes failed to appreciate having to guide the wayward woman to wherever it was she belonged, the side quest proved fortunate: without her scrambled mind, the trail leading to Yura would have died a miserable, pathetic death. According to Emily, the maid still held traces of the Abyss - proof that her consciousness had not been her own (and thereby also explaining her rock-dull wits, although Break couldn't be sure it accounted for every stupid thing she said in her staggered bouts of semi-consciousness). Using smoky remains as a guide, Emily fixed on Jubjub's presence and pointed the way while they traveled in haste.

Unfortunately, Break couldn't travel _fast enough_. Possession by another Chain meant Eques had been booted out of Reim's shadow, leaving said troublemaker defenseless in enemy territory: a situation uncomfortably familiar. Xerxes knew his duty as an agent for Pandora required him to dispatch Isla Yura immediately - to remove twisted fingers from reaching the Abyss' core (because messing with both the Baskervilles _and_ Pandora led to only one conclusion) - but his duty as a friend required him to retrieve Reim from the Duchess Nightray before that brainless fool found himself playing dead for real.

It was a serendipitous surprise when he discovered both objectives would be achieved by storming the same mansion. He didn't bother knocking. He simply ripped open the sky and let Mr. Mad Hatter make the necessary introductions.

...

Eliot watched from his window until Leo's bus plumed itself into obscurity. He squinted against the orange sun, noting a sky in which clouds were few and sparse. He approved of the clear weather: Leo wouldn't be rained on when he finally reached the orphanage. The black umbrella had been left lying in the Nightray's entry.

Eliot sighed and plopped himself in his swivel chair, slouching low with fingers brushing carpeted floors. Once Leo left he didn't really know what to do; everything suddenly became boring. He supposed he could reread _Holy Knight_, but didn't feel like it (he was, after all, back at that part where Edgar oh-so-nobly sacrificed himself for the good of those around him). He could see what his brothers were up to, but didn't want to run into Vanessa (she'd scold him for skipping dinner, only to turn up with an empty cheesecake platter ill-concealed beneath his bed). He could wander outside, but Vincent sometimes hung out in the gardens, and if Gil wasn't there Vince could be a bit too creepy for someone barely four feet tall.

He sighed and booted his computer. Aimlessly wandering around the Internet it would be.

He ended up typing random queries into Google's search engine (occasionally stopping to interact with the interactive Doodle), hoping to stumble across something exciting. It didn't happen. So instead he decided to order manuscripts for songs Leo had suggested they practice that afternoon, while their novels lay forgotten on the floor and the storm clouds outside bid good evening to a little party of rain showers.

He discovered a shared composer. The name was, of course, familiar to him, certainly more so after finding it time and again in that anthology Leo had given him so much grief over. He slouched forward with his chin cupped in one hand and enlarged the picture of the man, someone ridiculously famous in Pre-Tragedy Sabrie. The caption blurbed the tale of his short life, listing him first as a social recluse who, in his later teens, stumbled over a performer with equal truckloads of talent. (Eliot followed the little blue link and enlarged that picture, too, discovering a more severe-looking pianist with a perpetual scowl on otherwise handsome features. Those slate-blue eyes were almost familiar, but in the black-and-white of a century-old photograph, such vivid tellings of the intricacies between past and future are difficult to discern.)

They formed a duo, composing and performing, and were unfortunate enough to have lived within the very heart of a city where flourishing careers were stamped short by the acceptance of one last commission: that ball from which all hell broke loose. The night's main attraction (in terms of non-lethal entertainment, of course), they drew a large crowd, for they didn't oft perform for run-of-the-mill garden parties. Doubtless their fee was steep, but then again, so was the death toll, and the Baskervilles obviously did a thorough job of avoiding _that_ particular monetary transaction with such chaos burning the drapery.

Eliot stopped breathing. He could _see_ the aftermath in his mind's eye, asphyxiating on crackling-hot fumes. Slender fingers burned white-hot ivory. Sonatas erupted and notes melted. Violins sang songs of harmonizing death and women's screams made such a marvelous choir of white noise. He blinked and the vision passed.

His ears continued to ring. Shadows lurched with wicked grins. His head reeled. The floor grabbed his knees, his hands clawed his hair, and his unfocused eyes saw a flash of black and gold and gold and red and then he tumbled down, down, down, down, down.

Vincent blinked. Gilbert hollered. Feet trampled through the hallway. Doors flew open, bodies poured in and out and back again. Vincent moved to an out-of-the-way corner so he could watch without being stepped on, and while Gilbert was close to tears he just sighed, wondering if somehow this was his fault, wondering if it was because his red eye really did cause so much misfortune.

The shadows whispered _No, no, _but Vincent couldn't hear them. _It's not you_, they said. _It's the other one. _The other one.

Vincent couldn't hear them.

But Eliot could.

...

Jubjub took his time returning, choosing to procure a private train car because Reim's vehicle was small and it was too-many-too-long miles to Yura's place. He whittled time with crunchy snacks, marveling distractedly over the way his new body explained everythingthe Duchess needed to know.

Victory had come easier than he'd thought.

He stared out the window at a scene which remained unseen. His alien gaze was preoccupied, turned inward, gleefully watchful. He poured over the secrets of Pandora. Gorged on the mysteries of Barma. Devoured the dirt on Yura. A delighted cackle escaped dry lips. Yes, he reasoned, his mistress would be pleased indeed.

She greeted him with an arched eyebrow as he strode through the mansion's double doors, and he remembered to reign in his delight for fear of alerting Isla Yura. Carefully toting the briefcase, he followed the Duchess to her personal quarters. She stood by the window; he stashed leathery treasure behind an embroidered valise. Returning from his task, he watched the Duchess' reflection and saw her eyes flicker pointedly to the wardrobe. Acquiescing, he rose to uncover a dagger she kept hidden in an old hatbox. She slipped it up a sleeve; he wondered why it was necessary.

He had thought she'd be overjoyed, ecstatic to finally discover what he had learned (he was certainly_ excited to share_), but her face remained an impassive mask of regality and he understood caution was her motive. Caution. Yes, he understood.

Reim's body slumped bonelessly; the possessed form of the Duchess Nightray kicked him beneath the bed. Making certain the edges of her bedspread brushed the floor, she sat before a vanity table and listened to the piercing caws within her mind, sharing secrets Reim had conjured from whispering cobwebs and dust.

As the knowledge spilled and pooled and soaked, the sky outside did the same. Clouds gathered in rolling battalions, war-march commencing to the rumble of irregular, thunderous drums. The world warped and folded and filled with shredded, billowing cloaks and eyeballs wide and staring. But her own eyes were turned inward and the Duchess couldn't see beyond the powers of her Chain.

Concrete crumbled, steel suffered. The dining hall collapsed. Isla Yura wailed and wriggled; Jack Belzarius failed to save him_. _The dimensional holes ripped open by the Hatter's erasure of so many layered lies led straight to Abyss' heart; Yura found out the hard way the Will didn't take kindly to strangers. But even as the pathways to Abyss opened, so they closed, their links to the physical plane created and dissolved in the same instant by the great Chain's passing.

The Duchess' door crashed open and she was just about to berate that disgusting filth Isla Yura for entering her self-appointed personal quarters when she caught a flash of violet and white and realized Yura wasn't the man leaning casually in the doorway. Another glance revealed Yura's disintegrating mansion behind him.

"Hello," Xerxes greeted cheerfully. "Please excuse the intrusion." His voice and manner were polite, as was his courtly bow, but his red eye never left her face, seeing much more of her twisted heart than a blind orb should have.

The Duchess rose to her feet. Enraged, she summoned her Chain. Jubjub's released form filled the room, cacophonous cries resounding through remaining foundations, shattering crystal and glass. Vases of red, red roses exploded into bombs of watery-crimson confetti. Xerxes did little more than laugh, brushing shattered petals from his shoulders, ignoring the pieces which bit his skin. When the Duchess failed to be impressed by his insouciance, he sauntered inside. Jubjub reacted immediately; it snatched Xerxes up whole, crunching upon phantom-pale skin and fragile bones with two chomps of its powerful beak.

Gleaming steel impaled the roof of Jubjub's mouth, breaking through toughened shell, but no blood or bones filled the creature's gullet. No, the strange man had escaped and was holding the Duchess hostage, having slipped behind her to draw her own bejeweled blade from her sleeve to her throat.

"Call off your Chain," he said, voice sweet as acid.

The Duchess' eyes narrowed. In her moment of analytical indecision Jubjub made up its own mind to preserve its existence. The sword clattered to the floor. Xerxes reacted to the sound, not knowing what the Chain was thinking, but knowing it only had two targets to choose from and neither of which was him.

_It's going for Reim,_ Xerxes thought, dropping his hold on the Duchess. The woman stumbled backwards. She fell against a wall and regained her balance, Break facing her, sword in hand.

The Duchess' mind was calm and calculating, but Jubjub's was frantic. Moving of its own accord, it crawled from beneath the bed and stood, pistol held to Reim's knowledge-laden brain.

"You were looking for this, weren't you?" he cackled, releasing the safety. Glasses slid down a sweaty nose, but Jubjub didn't push them back.

"You keep visitors in strange places, Mrs. Nightray," Break observed, focusing his attention on the woman before him. (Her movements would be less predictable; fury born of indignation always clouded better judgement.) The Chain couldn't pull the trigger, Break realized, because the bluff was a hasty attempt to gain leverage in a situation where diplomacy hadn't grasped its first breath. The Chain was relying on instinct to stay attached to this world, but like Eques, it couldn't cheat its own death, couldn't harm the body it held.

But the Duchess _could_ do something stupid in the meantime.

"Jubjub," she said. "Shoot him."

There was a moment of heavy silence. Sweat poured from Reim's twisted face. Clawed fingers twitched. But then yellow eyes _rolled_, the bird _howled_ and Xerxes _realized his mistake_. Jubjub wouldn't die from a bullet to the head; Reim would. The Chain would only die if it were shot within its contractor's own body - _a borrowed one made no difference._

_It was nothing like Eques._

The report of the gun was deafening. Xerxes' eye went wide. His sword fell from slack fingers and fresh blood ran freely to splatter the floor in fat, slapping drops. The stains bled through the carpet.

The Mad Hatter tore through the roof with a flourish, and when the debris dropped, so did the Duchess.

...

It was difficult to breathe. It was even harder to move. Something rustled, clanked, and clattered. Pouring liquid. The smell of hot tea. Deliberate smack-slurping.

"Ah-ha, Reim-san! You're such a headache."

Reim groaned. He opened his eyes slowly, hating the sun for peeking through the curtains. His vision was terrible, but he assumed he was staring at his own ceiling, seeing how the excessively tucked-in quilt pinning him down seemed familiar enough. "Your voice is _not_ the first thing I want to hear when I wake up," Reim mumbled, one arm escaping (with no small amount of effort) to hunt for his glasses.

Break chewed strawberry cake, unperturbed. "You know," he said around a generous mouthful of pink, "I didn't happen to find your briefcase."

"Briefcase?" Reim grunted, fighting free of his temporary prison. He placed his glasses on his face (they were dusty; he'd have to clean them) and pushed the edge of the quilt down. Taking a quick look around Break's happily chewing form, he confirmed he was indeed within the walls of the Barma estate. "What are you talking abou -," he started grumpily, but then his gaze alighted on a suspiciously tidy desk and his eyes widened. "Oh."

A sparkling dish hid a widening grin.

"The _briefcase_," Reim moaned. He fell back against the pillows and buried himself beneath the blanket so he wouldn't have to watch Xerxes gloat. Unfortunately, the feeble barrier didn't drown out Emily's squawking laugher, so Reim furrowed his brow in silent opposition to the awful noise and stayed right where he was.

Xerxes patted the covered lump's head. "Now, now, Reim-san, there's no need to worry."

"Yes," Emily sang with a wicked smile. "The worst anyone can do is arrest, maim, and kill you!"

Reim threw his pillow at the doll. It connected with a satisfying _whump_ and a muffled shriek. He decided now would be a fantastic opportunity to remain in bed for the rest of his life, so he rolled over to face the wall, tossed his glasses on the nightstand, and reburied himself beneath his quilt. The last thing he heard was Break's obnoxious laughter before the door to his room shut, not knowing that with it went a battered briefcase, guarded diligently by a dark-horned stallion passing within a clown's scurrying shadow.

...

Comfortably settled, Leo read in his usual spot. (Hiding in the corner of Eliot's room, in that juncture of walls where the light from the window fell best. That spot of quiet and solitude where the imagination could bring to life words from a page and nothing would bother him when he was so deeply embedded in such travels.) Eliot sat beside him with a sigh. He stretched his long legs, one foot twitching with excess energy, the other still, but his head thunked wearily against the wall. His book remained unopened, jacket-less cover bland and boring.

"You sighed," Leo observed mildly, his eyes fixed on the crisp, not-yet-dogeared pages of his newest borrowed acquisition.

"Yeah, so?"

Leo half-smiled. He said nothing, but his eyes flickered to his friend's tired face. "You look awful."

"I feel it," Eliot replied.

"What did you do?"

Eliot grimaced and rubbed the back of his neck. "I, uh, didn't sleep well," he mumbled, facing away from Leo so the other boy had to lean over to hear him finish lamely, "...those nightmares. I had them all night." (His inborn sense of Nightray pride made admitting weakness a difficult task.)

"Is that so?" Leo replied, straightening to return to his book.

Eliot gave it a moment before asking, "That's all you're going to say?"

"Sure; I don't really care," Leo responded, mirrored gaze never straying from the sentences in front of him. Eliot blinked, then gave a hearty laugh.

Leo closed his book. "Did you want me to coddle you?" he asked.

"Hell no."

"Then what?"

Eliot looked at Leo's amused face (or so he assumed - those infuriating lenses _always_ made it difficult to see what Leo was really thinking) with a raised eyebrow. "I don't need coddling."

"Of course you don't."

"Nor do I need your pity."

"None was given."

"I'm just fine."

"Of course you are."

"I don't know why you're worried."

Leo tried to stifle his laugh. "I'm not."

"Good." Eliot sat back with a look of satisfaction. "Glad to know you care."

"I don't," Leo replied. "_You're_ making a fuss. _I'm_ trying to read."

"I am not!" Eliot said, indignant. He opened his book, propping it on his stomach so he could see. "_You're_ the one making the fuss," he mumbled, "and I'm reading, too. See?"

"I wonder what it was about yesterday," Leo mused.

"Huh?"

"I lost it, too."

Eliot watched his friend from the corner of his eye, book again forgotten.

"As soon as I got to the orphanage."

Eliot tried to not show his alarm. "Did someone get hurt?"

"No, I just disappeared."

"Where'd you go?"

"Sabrie."

Eliot frowned. "The orphanage is _in_ Sabrie."

"Not the epicenter."

"The epicenter," Eliot repeated, voice flat and unimpressed.

"I had this vision of beautiful walls. Walls with arching windows. And there was this sound, almost like it was leading me, like it wanted me to follow, and then I...," he searched for the words, "woke up." He finished with a shrug. "I woke up and found my way back."

"Pandora doesn't even have the damn place mapped. But you wandered into the middle of that massive sinkhole by yourself and came out smiling daisies? Forgive my skepticism."

Leo grinned.

Eliot shrugged and laid his novel aside. "So, was it creepy?"

"Looked like a maze of crumbling rock, the same as anything else."

"No one else has ever come out alive."

"You don't know that," Leo laughed. "Us kids play there all the time."

Eliot started. "Really?"

"Yes." Leo pushed up his glasses. "But we don't go much past the first couple of bends. There are so many branches in the passages after that it'd be impossible to make it back out. Like you said, not even Pandora's been able to map the place, and they've been trying since it collapsed."

Eliot's eyes narrowed. "So...how far did you _really_ go yesterday?"

"I've already told you."

Eliot's blood chilled. "And what was there?" he asked, fighting not to whisper. "What did you see?"

Leo smiled. "Me."

...

Wind ghosted across window glass. Blossoms bobbed on heavy-laden branches. Petals fell in great, swirling arcs, tumbling across the yard, tumbling through the air. The house was silent, its occupants asleep. The gentle pad-pad of one boy's footsteps were easily overlooked, for as he walked the rain fell in fat splatter-patters, wiping clean the earth as effortlessly as it wiped out his quiet noise.

He reached the piano room and took a seat, posture perfect, arms at the ready. Sometimes late at night the urge to play was too strong for him to sleep, and so he would depress the keys as quietly as he could, following vivid notes with care. Some of his best works were composed so late at night, when the world was still, his silent audience (captivated breaths held with nothing moving, nothing stirring, nothing disturbing). His body followed the song within, tendrils of awakened music pulling hands together, apart, and still. It was a song he'd tried to finish - tried many times at Fianna's - but somehow never had. A child would wake or a Sister would chase him to bed, and the magic would flicker and vanish, leaving hollow resounds of empty voices as if he had awakened from a dream he could still feel but not grasp. So it would remain for many nights, with him unable to recall the symphony heard so clearly until another night of magic found him, called him, whispered in his ear, and he would follow because he had to know how it went, he had to know the end.

He played along strokes so familiar, following a path well-tread. But the path gave way to one last oft-visited bend, and as he neared its tempting invitation his eager heart soared. Fingers flew and floors creaked and a weight settled next to him and the sound was so jarring his symphony broke into discordant cacophony and his hands felt nothing but raw notes leading nowhere.

Enraged, he slammed white noise and his grip slipped. His growl was feral. He knew he wasn't in control any longer because he was tucked away in the hold of an empty place and nothing could touch him here. He stayed still.

His body rose of its own accord and glowered at the unwelcome visitor. An arm raised and at first he couldn't decide how to strike, but then he thought of strangling.

Eliot met his eyes. Moonlight broke through twin mirrors, letting him see straight to lilac unsteadiness. "I know that one," he said, still and quiet. Calm.

Enigma's mind tottered on the balance between lunacy and lucidity, but the other boy's words made him blink. He stilled his twitching arms. Simple curiosity had gotten the better of him.

(_Then again, that's how these things always begin, isn't it?_ _With simple curiosity._)

"Tell me," he whispered.

"_E'lodea Dis_," Eliot returned, just as quick.

"It is unwritten," Enigma said, sitting uncomfortably beside the boy with the curious blue eyes. "You couldn't possibly..."

"Are you the composer?" Eliot asked, careful to keep his voice soft. He didn't want to reawaken his companion's anger, and certainly not now, not when he'd finally broken through to Enigma. This was his chance to see who this man was; _what_ he was; _why_ he was. His chance to unravel the mystery.

"Yes." The word was simple. Enigma looked only at his small hands.

Eliot debated with himself for a moment, wondering if it would be wise to take a wild stab - and promptly decided he didn't have much to lose. He took a deep breath and said, as casually as he could, "It was finished thirty years after the Baskerville's ball."

"The ball," Enigma stated flatly, "was a disaster from start to finish."

Eliot's eyes brightened. "You were there?"

"What do you know of my treasure?" Enigma interrupted.

"I know how it ends," Eliot offered.

Enigma stared at him with unreadable eyes, and Eliot wasn't sure if he was glad the glass on Leo's face had become transparent or not because he seemed just as cryptic now as he ever did. Just as Eliot was beginning to wonder (but not _worry_; he didn't _worry about stuff_) Enigma's hands ghosted over keys and played phrases he was so fond of. His eyes watched Eliot carefully. On a whim, he motioned for Eliot to join.

Eliot couldn't believe his luck. Not only had he not been throttled by this maniac in the dead of night, but he was receiving a personal invitation _to play with one of the greatest musicians who had ever lived_. His fingers trembled, he was so excited. He shrugged his shoulders and sat up straight, shaking his arms to hide sudden tremors. His face wanted to beam but he was careful to keep a debonair facade, because if he was too enthusiastic he might not play right.

He set his hands on the keys and let the energy out in controlled bursts, careful to keep the same rhythm Enigma had started, even if the song had evolved since the musician's death. It was tricky (Enigma's version was still unpolished, unrefined), but he was certain they'd manage.

The first bars were incredibly awkward, and Eliot could have cursed himself to the ends of the earth and back, with all the force he was throwing behind his words - but then he pushed the blush off his face and told himself to get his ass in gear. He was a Nightray! (After that, he sounded much better.)

It wasn't surprising, in retrospect, how well they matched, but at the time Eliot found it staggering. Enigma played much like Leo, but on a completely different level. Eliot felt himself rise to the challenge, and while he didn't have the same finesse Enigma did, he played with vibrancy, confidence, élan.

When they reached those last few measures of Enigma's known manuscript, the musician slowed and the boy continued. A breath held and a heart stopped and only two hands moved; in that space it felt as if the world was reeling and spinning and completely nonexistent. There was nothing but Eliot and the music, but suddenly Enigma's fingers were back on the keys and the song was liquid around them, flowing and coursing and drowning all else.

The final phrase faded and notes trickled away, both virtuosos holding fermatta harmony, and Eliot felt an unparalleled sense of triumphant accomplishment as trembling wires stilled. _He had just played with a true professional; a man of world renown. And not only that, but he helped him finish his song. _Eliot laughed his joy and turned to Enigma, expecting to be mirrored with a smile glitter-bright. Instead, he met the shock-eyed stare of a once beautiful boy, his corpse laid across a glossy black frame, one hand resting on those glorious keys last depressed.

...


	11. Epilogue

Pandora Hearts © Jun Mochizuki

...

...

_A single rose can be my garden...a single friend, my world. _

_Leo Buscaglia_

The breeze that day was ephemeral, nearly evanescent. Unaccompanied, Eliot stood quietly, dark suit heavy beneath the sun. The weather was the opposite of what he had expected. A black umbrella lay discarded at his feet.

Leo, ever contrary, decomposed without complaint. His cross-adorned grave rested amid rows of sleeping Nightrays, blanketed beneath a quilt of fresh earth and pillows lily-white with petals wide open.

Vanessa was the last to leave (Eliot had thought it would have been Gil - but then again, Vanessa had always stepped up as the strong one when their family broke in crumbling eggshell pieces). She relinquished her place beside her grieving brother's shoulder to (reluctantly, he knew; he could hear her hesitation, even through his grief-soaked fog) follow the trail trod by five other siblings, winding through the cemetery in dark-heeled boots toward a somber limousine. Little Gil and Vincent were already tucked inside, wailing great tears and sorrow, small hands clutching elder brothers in an attempt to find stability. Claude and Ernest held them tightly - faces drawn, lips pressed tight - not saying anything. They let the children cry. There were no answers to the repeated questions of why.

Fred remained outside the vehicle: watching the cloudless sky, the mounds of motionless stones. He blinked when Vanessa touched his arm.

They spoke in hushed tones, unwilling to disturb fragile stillness. He opened the door and helped her inside, making sure each of his younger siblings had a seatbelt secured before he climbed in behind. The driver gestured toward Eliot; Fred shook his head. The engine started with a choking rumble. Someone would return before dark.

Reim watched the family leave, himself and Break having already made their way to his own car. Break sat with Emily on his lap instead of his shoulder; he occupied himself with tipping her over. (She made little "oomph" noises whenever she hauled herself back up.)

A single breath of wind ghosted through the car's open windows and tossed Reim's earrings. (Break heard the movement, listened to the sound of tiny chimes. Tiny, tiny chimes. The buried child had returned home; he could name precious ones who hadn't.) He poked at Emily and missed. She giggled when he tried again.

Reim broke the silence, watching as the boy atop the hill lowered himself to his knees to place a bouquet beside those of so many others. There was a defeated sag to his shoulders, a mournful hesitation before he let stargazer lilies drop, a moment of stillness where Reim could almost see the soul behind blue eyes break.

"Xerxes...?"

Break, wanting to avoid the possibility of having to rely on a teary-eyed man to drive him home, decided to explain as clinically as possible. He shrugged an unsympathetic shoulder. "Inevitably, monsters are tied to the Abyss. There's not much else to it."

Reim crossed his wrists over the top of the steering wheel. "That doesn't make any sense."

Break sighed. It was Reim's job to think through these types of things on his own, but the melancholy was muddling his head; Break didn't appreciate having to explain. But, while they, as adults, hadn't been particularly close to the two boys, Reim had come to think of himself as a silent guardian (and goodness knew he put enough effort into figuring out the past to feel close to the present). Break smiled bitterly. He had, after all, been the one to tangle Reim up in this mess; he may as well help him sort out the knots. "Do you remember the child's first Chain?"

"Yes," Reim replied. "It was the Boojum."

"That's right," Break affirmed. "A gift from his father: the Chain that carries a curse of its own."

Reim frowned.

Break continued, undaunted: "I wonder if he knew it had the power to destroy those most beloved to its contractor _before_ transferring ownership?" Sensing Reim's responding glower, Break turned instead to Emily and spoke through a whisper, "I'll bet that was a _really _bad day."

"Now is not the time to make jokes," Reim retorted. "That child lost his entire family because of that one contract."

"Yes, yes," Break waved Reim's disgruntlement off as insignificant. He leaned his head against the headrest and fixed his sightless gaze out the windshield, holding Emily in a loose cup of clasped hands. "You're missing the point. You see, the orphan was introduced to Humpty Dumpty, and Boojum refused to play nice. The two destroyed each other." He rolled his head to the side and gave Reim a grin, "Simultaneous end and beginning of story."

Reim stared at the steering wheel, brows furrowed. "I imagine that much power colliding in a human body would be enough to fracture anyone's mind...especially that of a mourning child."

"Ah-ah, Reim-san, that's where you're wrong. Boojum didn't do anything to his mind."

Reim raised an eyebrow. Xerxes' story had suggested little else.

"It left him with a Pathway to Abyss," Break chuckled, raising a finger. "It took Humpty Dumpty down and something else rebounded, something held in limbo for a hundred ugly years."

"You're talking about a _human_?" Reim asked. He sat back, astounded. Jumping a century's worth of time via unstable Pathways was one thing...but to actually _exist_ in the Abyss for that long? Held there? Captive?

"The man we call Enigma was a victim of the Disaster. Lucky for the boy it wasn't a Baskerville come out of holding, hmm?" Break asked, poking at Emily's head.

"Xerxes, this is serious."

"I wouldn't suspect he was entirely human."

"Well, _you_ didn't come out as anything else," Reim retorted, then, after remembering to whom he was talking, added: "Did you?" He laid a suspicious eye on Emily.

Break gave a short laugh, thought about accompanying it with one of his signature grins, but let the moment pass. "There was a unique toll to pay," Break shrugged, trying not to think of how much he _still_ hated Cheshire, even though there was nothing more to be gained by it. "In this poor fellow's case," he continued, "the man had already begun conversion. Had he stayed, he'd have become a Chain."

"...but now he's back in the Abyss, becoming one anyway."

"Yes," Break conceded. "Though he _did_ find fulfillment in whatever he was seeking on this earth before he returned. That was enough to release his hold on humanity, to let go and let himself die. What becomes a Chain isn't the human soul, Reim-san. That moves on as it should at the moment of death; it is the body which remains, decaying to the Will's manipulations."

Reim rested his head against the frame of the window. He had heard rumors about the horrible nature and origins of Chains, but that sort of information wasn't easily verifiable - Pandora was secretive about such things. So instead he stopped thinking about Enigma's inevitable, inhuman fate and let his thoughts trace themselves back to a much fresher grave. "And Leo?" he asked. "What about him?"

"You saw the truth at the orphanage."

Reim lowered his eyes.

"The child had already died," Break said gently. "You knew the file in your hands couldn't possibly belong to him, because _Leo_ had left years ago. That rejected half-Chain was the only thing keeping his spirit bound to its body all this time."

"He was so young," Reim whispered, inwardly staring at red letters spread across the child's papers - garish words of _failed_ and _deceased_. "It doesn't seem fair."

"Of course it doesn't," Break replied, placing Emily on his shoulder. He buckled his seatbelt and waited for Reim to turn the key. Rolling up his window to cut off a swelling wind, he mused softly, more to himself than either of his companions, "But at least he had time enough to make a friend."

...

Eliot wandered through his room in a daze, eyes searching silent, shadowed corners where Leo loved to sit and read. His mind conjured phantoms of mirrored lenses, bright reflections of light where there was no substance of body. It looked much too real. He had to turn away.

The computer sat, quiet and still, screen dark and blank. But every blink of sad blue eyes brought to life lines upon lines of scrolling text defending that shit-bag Edgar just because Leo knew it would piss Eliot off. He saw cryptic questions and rapid-fire answers, strings of codes and numbers. Screens without names and faces without screens. An entire community stopping to witness the work of one brilliant mind, the carefully worded results of a kid who kept way too much time to himself, unable to just sit his ass down and enjoy a good book quietly like normal people do. _Nerd King,_ Eliot laughed. _You had to go and be book-wormier than all the others. _

The video game controllers were left untidy and tangled in the middle of the room. Empty cans of soda and wrappers from too many candy bars filled the wastebasket. A haphazard pile of socks dumped in front of the dresser. (They were clean, but Leo didn't like to fold them and Eliot didn't know how.) And of course, there were the various mounds of open, half-open, and open-but-upside-down library books which would soon become overdue if Eliot didn't hurry up and take them back already. (But they were Leo's books and he just couldn't. Not Leo's. He couldn't even bear to _close_ them.)

The room was quiet and empty, oppressive in terrifying stillness. (He even left the door open, because it hurt to have it shut.) He couldn't look at anything without seeing residual images of that messy-haired idiot he called his best friend. Even the blades of the lazy overhead fan dropped shadows, which, if seen from the corner of an eye, might trick the mind into thinking someone was there. The carpet seemed to depress of its own accord, suggesting the weight of a body which no longer lived. The windowsill creaked and Eliot remembered that was where he had first seen Leo - right outside that lilac-filled screen in the dead of night, just like now - with the moon glowing from dark, star-filled eyes.

He shut the shades.

He crossed the room and lowered himself on the bed. He flopped back, avoiding the pillows (pillows which had once smothered his face...a lunatic in his room in the dead of night...a half-assed attempt to cause suffering and suffocation. A bright sword reflecting the light of the moon like those deep, corybantic eyes, but they were just too beautiful to dim and then they were _real, Leo was real, _and he was nuts to become friends with the idiot but he just couldn't help it. There was something about the way he was so damn honest, the way he didn't let Eliot get away with anything, the way he was nervous when he came over for the first time and brought dessert and stammered at the doorstep until he called him an ass and Eliot never did say thank you. The way he saw strange things but Leo didn't mind, the way Leo _was a strange thing _but Eliot didn't mind, the way they got along even when they didn't, and the soft hold over trembling hands to let him know those nightmares didn't have to be lived alone. The way they sat on a piano bench and played long-forgotten keys forever, stumbling and cursing and fighting and _always arguing_ about something, and throwing vases at each other's heads...no, _Leo_ throwing vases and Eliot ducking, but still. Then the compositions which Eliot had once abandoned brought back with harmonies that flourished in renewed confidence and the notes scrolled like water from his pen and he couldn't believe someone else shared such a deep interest in all the same things he did. A friend who understood the words behind the notes and the tears behind the words, the sorrow behind every curse and the loneliness behind the bite. Someone who understood and accepted and had his own little quirks and read too many books all at one time and never really brushed his hair, who liked to wear green tee-shirts but always stuffed them at the bottom of the dresser drawer where they were sure to get lost and sorely wrinkled and grimaced when he had to fold socks because he'd rather fold anything else, so just hand him something that wasn't a sock and be done with the whining already you big baby.)

Eliot laid an arm across closed eyes, letting the memories run unhindered behind the projector screen of his eyelids, unable to stop the unwinding, flickering film, unwilling to even get up and try. He shuddered a deep sigh. There was nothing left to hold him back, no one else here. The room was too big, filled with too many ghosts. The door was open but they just wouldn't leave.

He ceased fighting and wept.

...

Soft footfalls trod an outside garden path. Red and gold eyes passed by windows tightly shut without a glance, focused ahead on a series of cold, stone steps. The child wandered into his secret place, a sanctuary sheltered from the world beneath an open sky filled with stars. His rabbit still wore a pale, pale ribbon neatly across its throat, but its face now bore a continual stream of drip-drop tears; Vincent was crying so many he thought they'd never dry out.

The stars twinkled. Laughed.

His mismatched eyes closed.

Water fell like crystal.

...

A trail of roses and peonies and daffodils, standing silent and calm outside pulled shades stained silver. A purple bush blossomed with swirling colors their mother had favored and tended herself - a special bush planted just for her favorite son, her little Elly (although they all were given one: Vincent's was honeysuckle) so they would never forget her tender touch, no matter how far away her travels took her.

The shadows beneath the lilacs danced as well, black and midnight-deep, swirling and twirling like the skirts of her favorite dancing dress, the one she wore when Eliot played at a recital or concert, the one she wore when he performed just for her. The one she chose on stage, on those rarest of rare occasions, with the bow of Elly's violin and her fingers dancing together, the way music was something that tied them together with a special bond that none of the other siblings shared.

The gentle caress of a mournful breeze set blossoms in motion; they bounced and swayed in a soft pendulum swing (whispering regrets that Mother would never again return, and although Eliot didn't actually know that, he _had always known it_), dancing ever so gently, purple flowers bobbing up and down, colors saturated to a hue of nighttime lavender so deep it sparkled with absolute cruelty.

But still they were just flowers, and still they bobbed on heavy-laden branches, innocent catalysts of enigmatic phantasmagorias plaguing the minds of those helplessly bereaved.

With insubstantial shadows they all held hands, dancing gently back and forth.

Back and forth.

Tick and tock.

...


End file.
